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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]
IMO Jones' prominence is not any sort of big mystery. Despite (or due to) opposition to lockdowns being tarred with the label of conspiracy theory, in practice to support lockdowns oft requires conspiracy theory. Especially when it comes to Florida. The outcome of DeSantis running a relatively lax policy of restrictions surrounding covid, which his opponents insisted would cause megadeath, was instead a middling outcome. The empirical results are in: lockdowns don't reduce covid deaths. But the entire political legitimacy of blue tribe now rests upon those restrictions serving to stop something that they did not, in fact, stop. So you need an explanation for Florida's middling outcome. Enter stage left, Jones, with a conspiracy theory about DeSantis covering up deaths, playing both into your biases and your need to have some way to soothe over the monstrous crimes blue-state governments did under the guise of stopping covid.
She is merely filling a gap in the market for conspiracy theories that she was best-placed to exploit.
Jones aside (I am in her district and she's...interesting.) there is some fishiness involving Florida's Covid reporting in particular. They haven't supplied data to the CDC, for example, for a few weeks: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_select_state=Florida&data-type=CommunityLevels (there are NOT zero cases or deaths). The state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, also has a...questionable record of statements and actions during the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ladapo.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but DeSantis loves Lapado playing down Covid for tourism reasons and attracting the kinds of residents who feel the same way. No one in FL is interested in lockdowns, but playing down vaccination and failure to encourage vaccination in a state full of old people is just poor leadership. Failure to update Covid data with the CDC makes it difficult for residents to determine risk. And there have been issues with Florida's leadership throughout the pandemic.
Florida updates it's data every two weeks. Demanding daily updates for number of cases of one particular virus, indefinitely, seems like an unusual demand for rigour: Nowhere pre-2020 was this demand expected. Nor is it clear what purpose such data would serve to individuals in determining risk. Case numbers are largely a product of testing, unlike inherently delayed random sampling. And this is even if we believe that the CDC is something that is respectable enough to be worthy of being supplied data by anyone.
Ladapo's questionable statements like... Supporting informed consent, as any medical professional should? Acknowledging that there's no empirical evidence for masks?
Florida's vaccination was done on the basis of oldest first. This seems obvious enough to me as a strategy, but apparently many US states decided to vaccinate "essential workers" including people in their 20s at negligible risk first? Do you think that a strategy other than by age is more effective?
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