News & Brews August 12, 2026
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AG Sunday sues TikTok
Yesterday, Attorney General Dave Sunday announced a lawsuit against TikTok alleging the social media company “deceptively categorizes itself as safe for teenagers when it offers a plethora of adult content, including topics like profanity, drugs, sexual situations, tobacco use and alcohol,” the Center Square reports. Sunday called the lawsuit “an action to hold accountable a company that values dollars over mental wellness.” The suit “asks for declaratory and injunctive relief and asks the court to require TikTok to be honest about its content when listing itself in an app store, and demands, under the state’s consumer protection laws, that it take steps to protect users from becoming addicted.”
New attempts to boot Green Party candidate
Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district race between incumbent GOP U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie and Democrat challenger Bob Brooks is already one of the most closely watched in the country. So a spoiler candidate is not something the Left wants. Now, a group of Democrats as well as the Green Party are asking the court to remove Green Party candidate Andrew Tupone from the ballot. The Morning Call reports, “Democrats … claim Tupone is a ‘spoiler candidate’ planted by Republicans to siphon votes away from the Democratic candidate, which Tupone has denied.” The Green Party, meanwhile, “claims that Tupone was never recruited nor endorsed by the party.”
‘The far left hits a wall’
Yesterday’s much-watched Democrat gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin saw establishment candidate David Crowley beat socialist “let’s cancel Thanksgiving and defund the police” candidate Francesca Hong. POLITICO’s perspective is that “Hong’s stunning loss … revealed limits to the far left’s power — and is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.” But some say not so fast and claim that Hong “was a fatally flawed candidate with a long string of gaffes — and that her loss shouldn’t be read as a referendum on the broader movement.”
As Shapiro cowers, Youngkin ‘goes to bat’
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writes that former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin “is picking a fight on school choice.” And “thank goodness” he is. Youngkin “is behind Empowering America’s Parents, a group planning to advertise directly to voters in the 19 states that haven’t joined the new federal program for tax-credit scholarships.” This includes Pennsylvania, where Gov. Josh Shapiro remains “noncommittal” on joining the program. The Ed Board writes that Shapiro “seems to fear the unions as he gears up to run for President.”
Proposal would ‘modernize’ voter roll maintenance
WTAJ reports that legislation proposed by GOP state Sen. Michele Brooks (Crawford, Lawrence, & Mercer counties) “would modernize how Pennsylvania maintains its voter rolls and how often they are updated.” The legislation “would expand the methods used to identify and remove deceased voters, shorten reporting and record-update timelines, and broaden the data used to identify voters who have moved.”
