Thread by @SchottHappens

Y'ALL!!!

This morning I wrote this article about the election fraud conspiracy events in Utah this weekend.

They are streaming the event live on Mike Lindell's website.

I am so excited. Let's play "Know your conspiracy theory!"

sltrib.com/news/politics/…

The presenter is Jeff O'Donnell, who calls himself "The Lone Raccoon of the Apocalypse."

He's a software engineer from Florida who is a big proponent that the 2020 election was fradulent.

For some reason, he's wearing this green sequined jacket.

O'Donnell starts off by saying "something was very wrong with the 2020 election."

He's made multiple claims about "phantom votes" that determined the outcome of the election.

He cites Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh as his influences.

Here's everything he blames for stealing the 2020 election.

Lots of blame to go around.

OH MY GOD!

HE IS DOING MAGIC TRICKS TO DEMONSTRATE ELECTION FRAUD!!

That explains the jacket.

Rep. Phil Lyman joins him on stage.

I have no idea what the hell is going on! This is some of the most unhinged sh*t I've ever seen.

His wife just ran onstage in a yellow raincoat yelling about a flood.

That's a reference to a discredited claim that poll workers pulled out suitcases full of Biden ballots at a counting center in Georgia after a pipe burst.

usatoday.com/story/news/fac…

The woman on the stage forgot her lines, so you could hear O'Donnell whispering to her what she should say.

The magic trick is over, and I'm completely lost because I have no idea what point he's trying to make.

Okay, back to his presentation.

His slides are titled "The Lone Raccoon kicks the Beehive State," but he's misspelled "Beehive"

He's discussing "phantom voters," which are voters that don't exist which O'Donnell claims election officials use to get the outcome "they" want.

He also name-dropped George Soros, so you can mark that off your conspiracy Bingo card.

These "phantom voters" provided a "Biden Boost" in the 2020 election, giving him the win over Donald Trump.

He's going over data from Mesa County, Colorado. That's important because Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is facing 10 felony indictments for a data breach in her office.

Peters was allegedly responsible for leaking the data from a Dominion Voting Machine online.

That data ended up in the hands of Ron Watkins, who many believe is one of the people behind QAnon.

Peters was scheduled to speak tonight, but she can't leave the state because of her arrest. She also had to give up her passport.

Phil Lyman traveled to Colorado recently to interview Peters for tonight's program.

O'Donnell keeps referring to "they" or "them" who are behind the election fraud.

He just said "They didn't just want to defeat Trump, they wanted to destroy him so he would never set foot on a stage again."

He's never said who "they" are.

Lots of charts to "prove" his allegations, but he hasn't offered any proof.

This is really hard to follow, but most of the people in the audience marinate in this stuff day after day, so they just accept it.

Oof. He just tried to make a "Dungeons & Dragons" joke and it bombed hard.

This event is sponsored by the Utah Patriots militia group. I 100% guarantee they did not play D&D.

Know your audience, Jeff! It's showbiz 101!

This has been going on for nearly an hour and he keeps promising to get to the Utah data soon.

His wife just joined him on the stage for another role play.

This is the worst community theater production I've ever seen.

He's finally getting to the Utah data.

He says the state is "belligerent" in withholding the data from them.

He's whining about how they can't get complete voter rolls because some data is protected.

Wanna know why? Because it's what the law says!

He's bringing up some data he says is from Edison Research that shows about 3,000 votes disappeared from Salt Lake County.

That's a bald-faced lie.

SLCO Clerk Sherrie Swensen says the county never reported any numbers to Edison.

Here's what Edison Research said in an email about O'Donnell's claims.

"Salt Lake County has copies of the Election Reports, and at no time was there ever an instance where there was a subtraction of votes totals. "

His claims all hinge on the fact that Spencer Cox got 55k more votes than Donald Trump in 2020.

How could that be?

It has to be fraud, right? It couldn't be that Utahns on the whole don't like Donald Trump?

It's not like Cox is a Democrat. He's a Republican.

Most of that 53k vote difference came in Salt Lake, Davis and Utah County.

This is the stupidest analysis ever.

"What does this mean?" O'Donnell asks.

"It means Cox cheated!" yells someone from the crowd,.

This group fervently believes that Greg Hughes *actually* won the 2020 GOP primary (he finished 3rd) and they hate Cox with a passion.

Now he says the 2020 election should be thrown out and re-done.

There is no legal or constitutional mechanism to do this.

This slide with his proposed solution is almost EXACTLY what the Secure Vote Utah ballot initiative and Rep. Phil Lyman's election bill sought to do.

Now he leads the crowd in a unison reading of the Declaration of Independence.

That's not weird...at all.

Now he's riffing on Joe Biden, calling him a "senile old man who cheated his way into the White House."

"Look at what's going on right now. It's almost Biblical," he says.

And that's the end of his presentation.

Thanks for playing. We're all a little stupider.

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gabelman is up now.

He's investigating the election in that state, so he's become a celebrity among the stop-the-steal devotees.

He just said a "theoretical" remedy for election fraud is "decertification."

"I say 'theoretical' because there is no mechanism for us to pursue that," he says.

Uh...wut?

Okay. My brain has melted from a day on Capitol Hill and this stupidty.

I'll come back to the replay tomorrow.