Another "Whistleblower" Hyped by the Media to Destroy a Republican Exposed

People Complaining About DeSantis Online.

I'm five days late in getting around to this story, but: Remember Rebekah Jones?

She claimed that she was fired from the Florida Department of Health for refusing to delete covid deaths from the official records. All to hide the truth of DeathSantis' reign of terror.

She has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on a GoFundMe on the claim that she is a Hero of the Resistance. She has practically lived on leftwing cable shows.

She was named by Forbes as their "Tech Person of the Year.

Charles C.W. Cooke reports: Every claim she's made is false.

This is a story about Rebekah Jones, a former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health (FDOH), who has single-handedly managed to convince millions of Americans that Governor Ron DeSantis has been fudging the state's COVID-19 data.

When I write "single-handedly," I mean it, for Jones is not one of the people who have advanced this conspiracy theory but rather is the person who has advanced this conspiracy theory. It has been repeated by others, sure: by partisans across the Internet, by unscrupulous Florida Democrats such as Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist, and on television, by MSNBC in particular. But it flows from a single place: Rebekah Jones. To understand that is to understand the whole game. This is about Jones, and Jones alone. If she falls, it falls.

And boy does it deserve to fall.

Jones's central claim is nothing less dramatic than that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy in the third most populous state in the nation, and that, having done so, she has been ruthlessly persecuted by the governor and his "Gestapo." Specifically, Jones claims that, while she was working at the FDOH last year, she was instructed by her superiors to alter the "raw" data so that Florida’s COVID response would look better, and that, having refused, she was fired. Were this charge true, it would reflect one of the most breathtaking political scandals in all of American history.

But it's not true. Indeed, it's nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn't a martyr; she's a myth-peddler. She isn't a scientist; she's a fabulist. She's not a whistleblower; she's a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message. Sober Democrats have tried to inform their party about her: "You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true, but that doesn’t make it true," warns Jared Moskowitz, the progressive Democrat who has led Florida's fight against COVID. But his warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Since she first made her claims a little under a year ago, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe accounts (and, once she realized that she was losing a percentage to credit-card fees, through paper checks); she has become a darling of the online Left; and, by pointing to her own, privately run dashboard, which shows numbers that make Florida's COVID response look worse than it has been, she has caused millions of people to believe quite sincerely that the state's many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud. Stephen Glass, the famous writer-turned-liar who spent years inventing stories but got caught when he pushed it too far, could only have dreamed of such a result.

Read the whole thing. It's jaw-dropping.

I'd quote more of it but 1, that's not fair, and 2, she's threatening to sue Charles Cooke over his reportage, and I don't feel like dealing with that kind of person right now.

If you don't want to read the whole piece, check out the Morning Rising video below the jump. It digests the story quickly.

But be aware: Reading up on her means you're probably an alt-right racist who hates women.

For a year now, pretty much everyone who has criticized Jones has met the same fate as did Salemi. It doesn't matter who they are, or what they have been arguing, the play is always the same. First, they are called a sexist or a racist or a member of the "alt-right." Next, it is implied that they are working with Ron DeSantis or with Vladimir Putin -- or, sometimes, with both. Then they are told that they hate "science" -- or, if they disagree with her or expose a given lie or confirm that she does not have the qualifications or experience she claims, that they have sold out.

Sounds like she's bucking for a job at The Bulwark.

And -- "Racist"?

Pale white skin, blonde hair, and what looks to me like cornflower-blue eyes.

Why, she's practically the twin sister of Rosa Parks!

She actually accuses an African American woman -- an actual scientist -- of having given the order to manipulate the data, which is of course nonsense.

It's not racist to call this woman a "murderer."

But it is "racist" to doubt Rebekah Jones.

By the way, she's on to her next series of claims.

Video below. As Enjeti points out, Rebekah Jones pushed the claim that DeSantis was scrubbing his records of covid deaths on CNN and MSNBC -- which is, ironically enough, exactly what CNN's and MSNBC's hero Andrew Cuomo was provably, admittedly doing.

See also this Twitter thread by Charles C.W. Cooke compiled at Twitchy.

It's something else. He offers background in that that doesn't appear in his article.

I mean, it's racist alt-right trash, but read it anyway.

posted by Ace at 06:19 PM

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