Beaudion Borrows from Bengs to Argue Rounds Lacks Integrity

Sometimes I look at candidates’ arguments and wonder, “Who writes this stuff?” In Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Julian Beaudion’s case, the answer appears too often to be, not Julian Beaudion.

Back in January when Kristi Noem and Donald Trump murdered and slandered Alex Pretti, I noticed that Beaudion issued a meandering and less-than-heartfelt condemnation of those fascist killers. My review of Beaudion’s text and comparison to his independent opponent Brian Bengs’s cotemporaneous and more direct call for accountability and justice indicated that Beaudion’s response to the Minneapolis invasion lacked heart because it came from a source without heart, artificial intelligence.

Then this month, Beaudion posted to Facebook his commitment to running a grassroots campaign and rejecting “dark money”. Beaudion specifically mentioned the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as a source from whom he would never take cash and hashtags AIPAC, but he appended a graphic showing thousands of dollars flowing not from AIPAC but from various corporations to the man he wants to replace, Republican Senator Mike Rounds:

Beaudion’s original post included two graphics; the second is cut off at the bottom of the above screen cap. Here’s the second graphic:

Note: the dollar figure isn’t cut off by my screen cap; Beaudion posted this Track AIPAC graphic as is, with the dollar figure cut off. That’s sloppy technical work by the campaign crew. And I’m not sure that a drive-by shot at Rounds’s popularity with folks who support Israel is the best tack in a red state whose electorate has shown little sign of signing on to the “Free Palestine” movement.

But the next day, failed Democratic candidate for governor Robert Arnold posted in the comments that Beaudion’s first graphic had a bigger problem: it appeared to come from Brian Bengs’s Senate campaign FB:

I click over and scroll down down down, and sure enough, there’s that exact graphic, posted by candidate Bengs on February 22, two and a half months before Beaudion posted it:

Bengs used the graphic in February to display examples of the “finance & tech PACs” whose checks he says Rounds is cashing—”Voters should ask themselves who he’s really working for — South Dakotans or the corporations funding his campaigns.”

But Arnold uses his screen caps from both candidates’ pages to support his own devastating point: if Beaudion is just copying Bengs, why should voters bother with a copy? Why doesn’t Beaudion just step aside and let the original do the talking (and campaigning, and winning, and legislating)?

Beaudion did not credit the Bengs campaign for the graphic he apparently borrowed. In a reply to Arnold an hour later, Beaudion disclaimed knowledge of the original source and said someone just texted it to him:

“The image was sent to me via text. However, the info is true”—

Hold on. As a candidate for United States Senate, you don’t just post to Facebook stuff people text you. A professional campaign vets material before putting it in ads and speeches and social media posts to verify facts and sources.

Beaudion suggests he checked the facts, but he still doesn’t know the source. I can affirm that, in less time than it would take to dig up the campaign finance reports and check each of the corporations named in the first graphic, I can drop the graphic and the phrase “Mike Rounds PAC” into Google IMage Search, and the first result I get is Brian Bengs’s Instagram post using that graphic again, apparently back in March.

Beaudion’s use of Bengs’s material drew a couple more negative comments, and around breakfast on May 6, Beaudion removed the first graphic:

Beaudion doesn’t apologize and instead bulldozes back toward his intended point.

But there’s the point: when you support your point with information you haven’t checked, you fall into mistakes that drown out your intended point. Instead of talking about Senator Rounds’s beholdenness to big money and your grassroots integrity, people end up questioning your integrity.

Citing your sources is basic practice for everybody engaged in public discourse, from political figures to journalists to students just learning to use the First Amendment responsibly. Always tell people where you get your information, whether it’s your own research, your opponents, or ChatGPT. Not telling people your sources, human or artificial, is claiming as your own something that isn’t yours, which those of us who still care call plagiarism.

Give credit where credit is due, and speak in your own voice. If you can’t do those things, maybe you ought not run for public office.