We Found More 2020 Voter Fraud!
It's always the ones you most expect.
I am putting you on warning: If you miss the livestream tomorrow night, you’re going to regret it. I have the keys; I’m driving this show; and it’s going to be an extravaganza.
Bring your gingerbread stout and buckle up on Thursday night.
Only for Bulwark+ members.
1. The Olds
You may have heard of The Villages, one of the mega-retirement communities in Florida. It’s home to lovely, down-to-earth Boomers who like to get drunk, bang it out, and occasionally indulge in a little white power talk.
Many of these fine citizens were upset by the results of the 2020 election. They held a vehicle parade on January 6 in solidarity with their more mobile comrades who’d journeyed to Washington. Here’s a report from the retirement center’s house organ:
Try not to think too hard about the resemblance to the Alliance of Magicians:
Anyway, I am here to tell you that while you might be looking down your nose at these deplorables, they were right.
There was election fraud!
And it was happening right under their noses . . . at The Villages!
SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Three residents of The Villages have recently been arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud, court records show.
Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. . . .
Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan, court records show.
Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege. . . .
Rider, 61, was arrested by Brevard County deputies at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3, according to court records. Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available, but prosecutors indicated he also cast ballots both out-of-state and in Florida. . . .
All three are registered as Republicans in Florida, voter registration records show.
It’s always the ones you most suspect.
By the by, in case you’re keeping score, we’ve found lots and lots of voter fraud from the 2020 election. Not enough to have made a material difference in the outcome, mind you, but some people have gone to jail for this stuff. And so many of them are . . . Republicans who committed fraud on behalf of Trump.
For instance, remember Rosemarie Hartle? Trump wouldn’t shut up about how she had mysteriously voted in Nevada three years after her death. The mystery has been solved!
Hartle was married to Las Vegas businessman Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican. In November 2020, Hartle told Las Vegas television station 8 News Now (KLAS-TV) that he felt "disbelief" when he found out that a mail-in ballot was submitted in his late wife's name. It was "pretty sickening," he said at the time, adding that he didn't know how it could've happened.
But Hartle had actually cast the phony ballot himself.
On Tuesday, Hartle pleaded guilty to the crime of voting more than once in the same election.
Oopsie!
Then there’s Edward Snodgrass, a local Republican pol in Ohio who—totally by accident—voted not only for himself but also for his dead father.
But say what you will about those golden oldies at the Villages: At least they didn’t kill anyone before committing their voter fraud, like Trump Super Fan Barry Morphew.
Morphew is currently being tried for first-degree murder. The prosecution alleges that he killed his wife, Alexandra, when he found out that she was going to leave him. That’s the “alleged” part. The part that Morphew has already confessed to is:
Barry Morphew told investigators he mailed the ballot on behalf of his wife, Suzanne Morphew, to help Trump win, saying “all these other guys are cheating,” and that he thought his wife would have voted for Trump anyway . . .
As always, projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism.
2. Which Is It?
Yesterday Conservatism Inc. rallied to the side of Fox News to insist that there was nothing improper about the texts Laura Ingraham & Co. sent to the president’s chief of staff during the January 6 insurrection.
In fact, Conservatism Inc. would have you believe that rather than exposing them as double-talking propagandists, the texts ACKSHUALLY prove that Ingraham and her confederates are the real heroes of the story.
I would dispute this characterization because the tape is utterly damning.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s take the Fox journalists at their word:
Let’s pretend that:
They never whitewashed the insurrection.
They understood exactly what was going on.
And they were heroically trying to get the president to intervene and stop the violence.
If all of that is true, then there’s a slight problem . . .
The president ignored their pleas.
So if what they said was correct—that the violence was out of hand, that it was destroying his legacy, etc.—and Trump ignored them . . . then at this point they’d have to be saying that Trump did something very, very bad. That his legacy was rightfully destroyed.
So either the Fox propagandists are innocent and Trump is guilty of encouraging a violent insurrection that should be seen as having destroyed his legacy.
Or Trump is innocent and they are guilty of saying one thing in private and another thing in public.
Which is it?
3. Get the Falcon Heavy
Normally I give you something to read here. Not today. Here are four paragraphs that constitute a pointilist cartography of American decadence:
Alison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer; a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. Breakfast is savory. Naps are naked. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat.
“You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not,” Roman told me, in October, sitting on a low-slung moss-colored velveteen chaise longue in a corner of her apartment, in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. She had moved in a few months earlier, having outgrown a smaller nearby apartment and its snug, Internet-famous kitchen. FreshDirect bags that she had used to haul her belongings were still visible in a corner. The bones of the new place were industrial chic: exposed pipes, a brick wall painted white. Roman had added hanging plants, a rattan Papasan chair, and a modular sofa she got from Joybird, giving the loft-style living area a seventies-folksinger energy.
Dusk was falling. Marigolds sat on a coffee table in a green glass vase. Roman had just lit a candle and was playing moody music. Eighteen months after a disastrous interview and its attendant miseries—“I was single, I was cancelled, I was in a pandemic”—she was feeling reflective. “The only way I will be successful is if I’m myself, because (a) I can have a really shitty attitude if somebody asks me to do something I don’t want to do and I can’t be myself, and (b) there’s so much noise out there, so many people that develop recipes, so many places that you can find one.”
It’s hard, even for Roman, to put a concise label on what she does. She’s always a cook, often a writer, occasionally a performer, and never a pushover, even when she’s getting in her own way. “In a world where everyone feels the need to be excessively polite, she’s excessively herself,” David Cho, a business adviser who consults on her projects, told me.
Read the whole thing if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend it. This is why we can’t have nice things.