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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
...aaand I hit the character limit. Well, I didn't have much more to add. But as political figures go, Rebekah Jones was not on my list of people I expected to ever hear about again. How is she still out there participating in society? How does she continue to get attention from the news media? As far as I can tell, she's never accomplished anything meaningful, ever. Her fifteen minutes of fame consisted in raising a large sum of money by being a critic of DeSantis who was willing to take dramatic liberties with the truth. And now there are likely thousands, even tens of thousands of Twitter and Reddit users whose priors just got updated in favor of "DeSantis is a facist" based on a kettle of lies and exaggerations amplified by institutions that will turn around tomorrow and warn us about misinformation.
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
Jesus Christ. It’s depressing to imagine a 13 year old making credible murder threats, but if he does…well, our hands are tied. Have you seen any links to the alleged meme?
Also, I guess this is an object lesson: just because there’s a political motivation to do something doesn’t mean it’s the wrong move. There are rules. Speaking of which,
There are definitely better ones to talk about. This is awfully close to the platonic ideal of “look what those people did.”
Jones posted it. It's a fat police officer with the caption "cops in their car waiting for the school shooter to kill himself so they can go in." But the point is that the meme was not the problem, the threats were the problem.
Fifteen minutes ago Jones tweeted:
So she continues to maintain that this is about a meme in the face of overwhelming evidence against that claim. (The idea that she "bested" DeSantis is also just... wild. He won re-election with almost 60% of the vote.)
Did you notice me lampshade this at the beginning of my post? How about the tightrope metaphor? Was I too subtle? I did try to note that there are similarly bizarre figures on the "other side" (with the caveat that they seem to get less vocal support from rank-and-file conservatives; even Santos and Greene take flak from Fox News, do not enjoy the support of default subreddits, etc.). I do think this is an interesting case study for the idea that white liberals are more likely to have mental problems. I don't think Jones is the "best" of what the left has to offer! What catches my attention, though, is the apparently large numbers of leftists who apparently believe that she is, including, apparently, the Miami Herald. That's interesting to me, in ways that Jones herself really isn't.
Yeah, you were pretty clearly aware. Certified Deiseach moment.
I think that’s still against the spirit of the thread, if not the letter.
It is about the Culture War, in the sense of “here’s some two-movies-one-screen news coming down the pike which will probably ignite flamewars you may get caught up in, here’s a side of the story you may not see represented elsewhere, but feel free to research it yourself.”
I feel both smarter and dumber for having read it.
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Not sure I follow. Pretty sure that neither me nor nara is a Deiseach alt.
It would be pretty funny if naraburns had been running a "feisty Irish lady" alt all this time I guess.
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