When writing a story you should start with the research not the headline. This is exactly what I did when I was asked to write an article on the Kathy Zhu situation. If you are not familiar with Kathy Zhu, she was the Miss Michigan beauty pageant contestant who recently had her crown stripped from her. The pageant organizers say it was for violating the rules that mandate contestants must be of good character. Kathy claims it was because she is a conservative. Furthermore Kathy, in a reply to her own tweet, shows the text conversation she had with someone from the pageant. In that exchange Kathy mentions one Scotland Calhoun as the possible person who complained to the pageant. This piqued my curiosity so I looked into Scotland.

Scotland Calhoun ran unopposed for a congressional seat in Florida. Due to some sort of mix up that allowed Scotland to run but would leave her ineligible to hold office due to her age being a few months shy of 21, she dropped out of the race. Kathy and Scotland appear to have gotten into a Twitter spat over this error. I say appear because Kathy’s tweets are all “unavailable” leaving us just Scotland’s half of the exchange. At one point it appears Kathy implied that Scotland kept the $50,000 the GOP donated to her campaign after Scotland dropped out of the race.

A Twitter user who was watching the exchange popped in to produce the records showing that Scotland did indeed return the money to the GOP. I went to the supervisor of elections website myself to confirm that the tweet shown by the third party was in fact legit. Looking at the list of expenditures for the Scotland Calhoun campaign you can she did indeed pay the money back.

You really shouldn’t lie about people (or be too lazy to fact check). pic.twitter.com/PlvpITF255 — Brett MacDonald (@TweetBrettMac) January 8, 2019

While the whole Scotland Calhoun political drama may seem like an unnecessary tangent it is actually the key to this story.

You see, I actually reached out to Kathy Zhu asking about the deleted tweets and a deleted political Twitter account. Shockingly I received a reply from Zhu in which she denied everything. Her response was, and I quote…

“I haven’t deleted anything except the hijab tweet. And that’s because it was already out in the public. Everything else was either photoshopped or taken out of context. I also only deleted 2 videos that I made because they weren’t even politics related. No further comment.”

Not one to let a “no further comment reply” deter him, I pressed Kathy further on what I had stumbled upon.

Kathy would go on to claim Scotland has been cyber-stalking her for over a year. Zhu would go on to reveal she has called the police on Calhoun three times and has an ongoing case against Scotland. Kathy would also throw out the claim that Scotland got her kicked out of her sorority among ruining other things for her. I say claim because when I asked for some sort of evidence, even going so far as to say I would merely view and verify the evidence but not print it, she refused to give me any. Kathy ended our chat saying she wants the public to not worry about the Scotland thing but focus on the silencing of conservative voices.

That is what Kathy wants us to focus on and all she has done publicly has been to reinforce that story. Unfortunately for Kathy I’m an actual journalist and not an activist or a reactionary. As the links to Scotland’s Twitter account shows, Kathy has deleted many tweets despite her claims to the contrary.

Looking into this further I stumbled upon a video from Fusion that featured Kathy Zhu. In the video a clear screenshot of Kathy’s Twitter account is shown. Now, in the bottom of Kathy’s profile is a link to a second, now deleted, Twitter account named KathyZhu23.

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Using Twitter’s search function I was able to follow a series of tweets until I came upon a Twitter account from 2015 that had archived several questionable tweets from Kathy.

It’s ridiculous for @PoliticalKathy to pretend like she doesn’t understand why the beauty pageant organizers wouldn’t want her as a representative when she’s a straight up troll: pic.twitter.com/NbpcyAi2lt — Ja Ag (@jaguarultimo) July 20, 2019

Now those on the left will scream that these tweets are pure evil while some on the right might say they are merely borderline. Whatever way you view these tweets there is no doubt that the beauty pageant wouldn’t want to be associated in any way with them. Kathy Zhu isn’t a conservative being silenced for supporting President Trump. She may be the victim of cyber-stalking but the source of information doesn’t matter if they are speaking truth. The fact of the matter is this is just another story where truth is going to be lost as both sides of the media rush to claim their narrative is the correct one.