Why I Don't Trust Adam Kinzinger.

Twelve Years of Voting Against You, Then Two Years of Making You Cheer for Him.

Adam Kinzinger addresses the Democratic National Convention Image credit: Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times

Adam Kinzinger stood at the podium of the 2024 Democratic National Convention and publicly stated that Donald Trump is “a weak man pretending to be strong.” The crowd cheered. They loved it. Shit, I loved it when I first saw it. Emotions were high back then, not to say they aren’t now, but in 2024, it was wild. Democrats who had spent decades watching Republicans dismantle the safety net, defund Planned Parenthood, and vote against every freakin’ labor protection that ever crossed a House floor proudly stood up and gave him a standing ovation. He was, in that moment, everything the left had been told to want. A Republican who finally had some balls and said it out loud.

What we fail to do time and time again as voters, is ask the only damn question that truly matters. What exactly had Adam Kinzinger been doing for the twelve years before he became useful to them?

I know what you're thinking… “here she goes again.” But this isn't a hit piece. I like to call it, ‘the whole story.’ The part that gets left out of the newscast, the panel discussions, the primetime segments, documentaries and substack live conversations. The inconsistencies. The money. The people who got hurt while everyone was looking the other way. Public figures don't get privacy from accountability. That's the trade they made when they took the mic. I’m just a writer who reads a lot and happens to have an opinion because my brain is wired for patterns. My special interest is following money trails and finding the anomalies in the stories I read.

Because I grew up in white supremacy patriarchy, I’ve learned how to find the omissions in the stories, what red flags look like, what they sound like, how to combat relentless gaslighting and dismantle straw man arguments. And I found, what seems to be, a possible grift, and all I had to do was keep asking why and pull on some threads. I have no secret sources, no insider information. I only use publicly available information. The same information available to everybody.

Let’s Start With His Voting Record

Zero percent lifetime rating from Planned Parenthood. Consistent Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America scorecard approval for voting to restrict abortion access across his entire congressional tenure. This means he spent twelve years voting against abortion access and against Planned Parenthood funding every single time the opportunity came up.

Voted to defund Planned Parenthood.

Voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Voted against labor rights, environmental protections, gun control, LGBTQ legal protections, measures to address racial inequality.

He also voted against women in his district, the workers, the uninsured, and the queer kids interests for twelve consecutive years while Illinois sent him back to Washington five more times because the party needed the seat.

Voted with the Republican Party 95 percent of the time through his first several terms. By 2021, that number had dropped to 76 percent. But only after, not before, breaking with Trump made him famous.

All of this is public record and undisputed. And none of it gets mentioned on CNN or anywhere else as far as I could find.

His Role in January 2021

Kinzinger voted to impeach Trump, one of only ten House Republicans who did. At the time there were 213 House Republicans seated. He then served on the January 6th Select Committee, two years of primetime hearings, his face on every fucking network, his voice carrying Republican credibility because Democrats desperately needed to give the proceedings bipartisan legitimacy. In those two years, he also raised $6.7 million in campaign donations… from people who believed they were funding democracy.

He was not running for reelection. Illinois Democrats had redistricted his seat out from under him. He didn’t walk away from power on principle, which is what a lot of people were led to believe. He said to everyone, “I cannot focus on both a reelection to Congress and a broader fight nationwide. I want to make it clear — this isn’t the end of my political future, but the beginning.”

Smells grifty to me. So, I dug further.

Turns out, while he was out here selling the "broader fight" narrative to his Democrat supporters, he turned around and told Newsweek that Democrats had "specifically targeted" him in redistricting. Same week. Two completely different stories for two completely different audiences. He needed his donors to see a martyr. He needed the press to see a victim. Well done Kinzinger. You got me, asshole.

He didn’t walk away from anything. Power walked away from him when they redistricted his seat out of existence. Of the $6.7 million raised in that cycle, approximately $140,000 went to other candidates. The rest went to $1.75 million in consulting fees for a man not running a campaign, to personal airplane hangar storage and mileage reimbursements billed to donors, to a leadership PAC that purchased his campaign committee’s vehicle, and to $65,000 in private club dues (Capitol Hill Club and the Former Members of Congress Club) charges the FEC explicitly prohibits being made to campaign accounts. He walked out the door with $3.34 million still spread across his committees.

And no, this isn’t speculating. The FEC opened its own investigation with no complaint needed, they initiated it themselves and found a unanimous 5-0 violation of federal law, $133,450 in excessive contributions mishandled by his committee, and he only paid a $19,000 fine to close the file. That was November 2024 and it came with ZERO media coverage.

Then he converted his campaign committee into a PAC, transferred the money, and opened a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Country First Foundation, with the same mailing address as his leadership PAC, granted tax-exempt status in 2023. Just for shits and giggles, it’s important to note that a 501(c)(3) does not disclose its donors.

How convenient.

In the 2023-2024 cycle, the Country First PAC raised another $2.3 million and gave $38,212 to actual candidates. That is one dollar and sixty-six cents of every hundred raised going to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest is the machine. It went to salaries, consultants, fundraising infrastructure — whatever was needed to continue staying in circulation.

Five days after leaving Congress, he announced his CNN contract. I read estimates placing it at $400,000 to $600,000 annually. More than triple his congressional salary. He had been auditioning for it for two years from a committee seat that put him on primetime television every few weeks, and only the people who understood what was happening said so in real time. A reporter from Axios, Tim Baysinger, said that Kinzinger “Was basically giving CNN his resume for the past year.” The network needed a Republican who would say the thing without defending the indefensible. He needed somewhere to monetize what the Jan. 6 committee had built for him. Boom. Clean transaction. Nobody will notice. Right?!

Everything Feels So Manufactured

Since then, a memoir, a documentary about himself, a speaking circuit charging $20,000 to $50,000 per engagement, college campus tours, Principles First summits, the DNC speech, keynotes at resistance-adjacent conferences. He spoke at Tufts in April 2026 to a packed auditorium that gave him the optics of a man who had paid a real heavy price. He said all the things to pull at their heartstrings. The audience did not ask about the $65,000 in prohibited club dues. The audience did not ask about the $2.3 million that produced $38,000 for candidates. The audience was there to be reassured, and he is extraordinarily good at reassurance. He’s been celebritized.

Now He’s Flying Kites About 2028

A possible presidential run? Not sure if he’s planning to run as a Republican or a Democrat yet. He said in December 2024 he’d consider it either way and said he’s “probably closer to a Democrat now.” He’s been greasing the wheels in the Illinois Democratic donor room, showing up at dinners where Senate candidates are being vetted, keeping every door just barely cracked open. He has found the optimal position of being too big to ignore, but not committed enough to be held accountable.

What I think Kinzinger understands that his audiences often don’t, is that the resistance is a market just like any other. Same thing I believe Lev Parnas is doing. Parnas still won’t answer any questions about his GoFundMe money. In fact, he actively dodges, ignores and attacks anyone who presses him about it. Just recently, it was brought to my attention that there’s now an FEC complaint against him regarding his campaign funds. The truth always finds it’s way to the surface.

The resistance market has a customer base with specific emotional needs — the need to believe there are still Republicans of conscience, the need for insider validation of what we already know, the need for a witness who came from inside the room. He supplies that need with razor sharp precision. Each performance is a product sold to a constituency that finds the product deeply comforting.

We don’t call these assholes ”state actors” for nothing. They’re acting. Wake up people. These politicians who flip sides and grift our money out of our pockets are playing a role and we keep falling for it. Our discernment in this country is a joke and we really need to fix that. We look stupid to those already awake and to the rest of the world.

Comfort is not the same thing as accountability.

A man who voted to defund Planned Parenthood over and over, consistently, does not become a friend to women because he said something good about democracy. A man who voted against labor protections for an entire fucking decade does not become a working-class ally because he cried on camera during a January 6th hearing. A man who spent two years building a media profile on the Jan. 6 committee, raised $6.7 million while doing it, gave two cents of every dollar to actual candidates, billed donors for his personal airplane storage, and walked out with $3.3 million in his accounts, did not sacrifice his career for principle. He survived the end of one operation and then built a better one.

The people who handed him the DNC podium knew his voting record. They chose the optics anyway. And that’s a choice they’ll eventually have to answer for.

What the rest of us can do is stop letting the ONE good vote erase twelve years of the rest of them, and start asking whether the people we’re platforming are useful to movements we believe in or whether they’re just very good at making us feel like they are.

Those two things are not the same thing, and Kinzinger has made a very comfortable living on our inability to tell them apart.

Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. You be the judge.

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