But I want to propose something different today. Something sharper.
A RINO isn’t just a Republican you disagree with. A RINO is a subversive element. A cutout. A placeholder for outside power. Someone who parks themselves inside the Republican Party not to advance conservative principles, but to hollow them out from within—often with the active encouragement, and the checkbooks, of people who openly despise the Republican Party.
Not always. But more and more often.
And the tool they use? Open primaries. The same open primaries that let Democrats walk into a Republican contest, pick up a ballot, and vote for the weakest Republican in the race—or worse, vote for a fake Republican who’s really just a Democrat in a borrowed suit.
Let me give you the freshest, clearest example of what I’m talking about, because it just happened.
Down in Tennessee, Congressman Andy Ogles—Trump-backed, conservative Republican—just lost his primary. And who took him out? Was it a grassroots conservative challenger? Was it the local party?
No. It was a political action committee called the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition. Sounds innocuous, right? Like a group that wants to fund scholarships or fix potholes.
Wrong.
According to reporting from Politico and E&E News, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is a solar-energy super PAC. Its top donor is Chris Larsen, a Silicon Valley billionaire who gave nearly five and a half million dollars in 2024 to Future Forward PAC to support Kamala Harris for president. Let me repeat that: the same money guy bankrolling this “Republican” primary effort was one of the biggest Democratic donors in the last presidential cycle.
And he wasn’t alone. Running the PAC is Michael Brune, the former executive director of the Sierra Club.
So let’s be blunt. You have a Democrat megadonor and a Sierra Club veteran dropping two million dollars—more than both Republican candidates combined—into a Republican primary in Tennessee. Not to help the strongest conservative. Not to advance limited government. But to punish Andy Ogles for opposing green-energy subsidies, and to install another Republican, Charlie Hatcher, who would be more pliable on their agenda.
Now ask yourself: is that a Republican primary? Or is that a hostile takeover using Republican ballots?
Ogles was backed by President Trump. He had the endorsements. He had the district. But a billionaire from California who funded Kamala Harris decided he didn’t like Ogles’s voting record on solar tax credits, so he bought himself a different Republican.
That, my friends, is not ideology. That is subversion. That is exactly what a RINO factory looks like in the year 2026.
And Tennessee wasn’t the end of it. It was the beginning.
The same Invest in Tomorrow Coalition just spent money attacking Congressman Chip Roy in Texas. Roy, as you know, spent last year trying to claw back renewable-energy handouts in Congress. In response, this green-energy PAC projected “Good Riddance Chip Roy” onto a building and dumped cash into the primary against him. They forced him into a runoff for Texas Attorney General.
They are currently targeting Senator Lindsey Graham’s seat in South Carolina, with at least a million dollars pledged to defeat Congressman Ralph Norman in the GOP runoff there.
Do you see the pattern? This is not about cleaner air. This is not about thoughtful disagreement within the party. This is a partisan outside agitator—funded by Democratic energy, run by environmental activists—interfering in Republican primaries to elect Republicans who will vote like Democrats on the issues that matter to them.
That is the *new* RINO. Not a principled moderate who wants lower taxes but supports school choice. Not someone who agrees with Reagan 80 percent of the time.
It is a manufactured candidate. A proxy. A rental.
And in many states, they wouldn’t even need the TV ads to pull it off. All they need is an open primary.
Let’s talk mechanics for a second.
In an open-primary state, a Democrat—or an independent, or a complete non-ideological opportunist—can show up on Election Day, ask for a Republican ballot, and vote for the weakest Republican in the race. Or the fake Republican. In some states, same-day registration makes it even easier. You can literally walk in as a Democrat in the morning and vote in the Republican primary by noon.
Why would they do that? Because in a deep-red district, the general election is a formality. The real election is the primary. So if you can’t win as a Democrat in November, you win by electing a Republican who votes with Democrats in the primary.
There’s a name for this. It’s called party raiding. And it’s not theoretical.
Back in 2012, Democrats in Michigan crossed over in the Republican presidential primary to vote for Rick Santorum—not because they liked him, but because they thought he’d be weaker against Barack Obama than Mitt Romney would be.
Rush Limbaugh did the reverse in 2008 with “Operation Chaos,” urging Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries to prolong the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But here’s the difference: Limbaugh was a talk-radio host openly trying to stir the pot. He told you what he was doing.
These new operations are not telling you. They are not openly pushing Democratic candidates in Democratic primaries. They are running *Republican* candidates in *Republican* primaries, funded by left-wing donors, using Republican branding, and counting on Republican voters not to notice the wiring under the board.
And when I say fake Republicans, I’m not being metaphorical.
In Wisconsin, during the recall wars, the Republican Party literally recruited fake Democrats to run in Democratic primaries. They called them “placeholder candidates.” The idea was to force the real Democrat into a longer, more expensive primary and buy time for the Republican incumbents. Democrats screamed bloody murder—and they were right to. It was a sham.
But turn the camera around. What do you think is happening now in Republican primaries? It is the same play, run in reverse. Outside money comes in. A candidate gets parachuted in with funding from people who will never vote Republican in November. The researcher is a Sierra Club veteran. The money is from a Harris donor. But the yard signs say “Republican.”
That is the modern RINO.
Not the senator from Vermont who caucuses with the GOP. Not someone who believes in a 15-week abortion limit instead of a heartbeat bill. Those are policy disagreements. Those can be debated.
A RINO is a candidate whose financial survival depends not on Republican voters, but on Democratic donors. A candidate who cannot win without the intervention of people whose stated goal is to defeat Republicans up and down the ballot. A candidate who will sit in caucus meetings, nod along to conservative talking points, and then vote to keep the renewable subsidies flowing because that is what their actual funders require.
And here is the ugliest part: they want you to feel guilty for calling it out.
The minute you say, “Wait a minute, that candidate is funded by Kamala Harris’s biggest booster,” the press calls you a conspiracy theorist. “How dare you question the integrity of a primary?” they say. “Everyone has a right to run.”
Sure. Everyone has a right to run. But everyone else has a right to know who is paying for the campaign.
If your campaign is being floated by a billionaire whose second-biggest donation in 2024 went to elect Kamala Harris, you are not a Republican insurgent. You are a vessel. You are a delivery mechanism for someone else’s agenda.
And the tragedy is that the voters in Tennessee didn’t necessarily know that. They saw the ads. They saw the mailers. Maybe they liked Charlie Hatcher’s bio. He’s a former agriculture commissioner. Seems like a decent guy. But they didn’t see the pipeline leading back to San Francisco solar executives and the Sierra Club.
That is the genius of the setup. It’s camouflage.
Now, why does this matter so much now? Because the old RINO—the country-club Republican who just disagrees on tax rates—is dying off. The new threat is far more sophisticated. It understands that in polarized America, you don’t beat Republicans by calling yourself a Democrat in a ruby-red district. You beat them by calling yourself a Republican, funded by Democratic dollars, running to the right on cultural issues and then drifting left on the economy the minute the general election is over.
It’s the political equivalent of a phishing email. It looks like it’s from your bank. It uses your bank’s logo. But the money goes to someone in another hemisphere.
So when someone asks you, “What is a RINO?” don’t give the canned answer. Don’t say it’s a moderate. Don’t say it’s someone who votes with Democrats 30 percent of the time.
Say this: A RINO is an operative. A Trojan horse. Someone who uses Republican registration, Republican ballots, and Republican districts to advance the priorities of the Democratic donor class. Someone who couldn’t survive a closed primary because their funding sources wouldn’t survive the daylight. And increasingly, someone who relies on open-primary systems and outside super PACs to do what they could never do honestly: get elected as a conservative and then govern as a progressive.
Is every Republican with a mixed voting record a RINO? No.
But is every candidate backed by partisan outside agitators trying to rewire Republican primaries from California boardrooms a RINO?
You bet they are.
And the next time a PAC with a focus-grouped name—“Invest in Tomorrow,” “Citizens for Common Sense,” whatever Orwellian phrase they dream up next—starts running ads in your district calling a sitting conservative a “MAGA traitor,” check the FEC filings. See where the money comes from. Because I can almost guarantee you: it isn’t coming from your neighbors.
It’s coming from people who hate everything you stand for—and who have figured out that it’s cheaper to buy a Republican than to beat one.
Be careful out there. Know who you’re voting for. And remember: a real conservative doesn’t need a Sierra Club chaperone and a Harris donor to win a Republican primary.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
