The contestants for Season 7 of Netflix’s dating reality show Love Is Blind dropped yesterday, and people are already scrutinizing their backgrounds.
But with the new season’s Washington D.C. setting, some of them are facing even more grilling than usual.
One contestant, Taylor, is already in the crosshairs of conservatives, who are linking her to the Chinese Communist Party based on her work for the Colorado-based nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).
“BREAKING: One of the Season 7 Love Is Blind Washington, D.C contestants works for a radical dark money group collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party to ban gas stoves,” Republican comms flack Steve Guest posted breathlessly on Wednesday afternoon.
He pointed to Taylor’s work with the non-profit, where she works on federal policy in the U.S. with a focus on heavy industry decarbonization (specifically related to clean hydrogen practices) and linked to a Washington Free Beacon article on RMI summarizing the organization’s work with the Chinese government on green policy.
The Free Beacon accused RMI of being “hardly staffed by an objective group of scientists” after it published a study in 2022 in collaboration with the University of Sydney and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine claiming that gas household stoves could be behind 13% of asthma cases in children.
Imagined threats of gas stove bans by the Biden administration have become fodder in the culture war in recent years, though the federal government denies it is thinking about implementing one.
The Free Beacon piece also details how RMI worked with China’s National Development and Reform Commission in 2013 where they wrote a report that advised the country to replace appliances and generators with clean energy.
The Free Beacon also scrutinized a board member of RMI who founded a Chinese private equity firm.
The Daily Dot couldn’t immediately get in touch with Taylor, but according to her Linkedin page she was in university in 2013, so it’s unlikely she was involved in the collaboration. She’s started working at RMI in 2022.
Guest’s tweet was quickly mocked on X, with posters wondering if the tenuous connection meant much of anything.
“Oppo on reality show contestants, that’s what you do now, huh?” posted @CertainlyNotLiz.
Others said the attack was perfect marketing for the season.
“Nothing more DC than dropping oppo on reality TV contestants,” wrote an NBC reporter.
“OPPO RESEARCH ON DC REALITY TV SHOWS” added @Brazil201.
But others thought Guest might be on to something.
“naïve to the world, desperate for attention, she is the perfect product of the indoctrination machine – exactly what this communist regime ordered,” posted @wrighttd darkly.
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