Regardless of what the establishment media like to pretend, Democrats are just as likely to nominate kooky conspiracy theorists for Congress as Republicans. They proved it last night in Florida by nominating Rebekah Jones.
With more than 62% of the vote, Jones won the Democratic nomination to challenge Rep. Matt Gaetz in Florida’s 1st Congressional District. Jones had floated running in several other districts in Florida and even in Maryland, but she settled for running against Gaetz, which is likely to give her more fundraising opportunities and Twitter praise from politically obsessed liberals who might be willing to ignore that Gaetz’s district is among the most Republican in the state.
Jones is, undeniably, a conspiracy theorist. She was formerly a dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health, where she crashed the department’s COVID-19 dashboard and locked another administrator out of his account so he couldn’t reverse her alterations. Jones was later fired and then claimed that she actually lost her job because she refused to alter data to make Florida’s COVID-19 response look better than it was. This was a lie — Jones did not have the ability to edit the “raw” data as she claims she was asked to. The Health Department’s Inspector General found that her claims were “unsubstantiated” and “unfounded.”
To top it all off, when she created her own tracker with the “real” COVID-19 death total in Florida, she claimed that there were a whopping 2% more deaths than Florida’s official numbers — something mentioned by few of the media outlets she hoodwinked into covering her silly little story.
On top of all of this, Jones was arrested after she allegedly accessed the state’s emergency alert system illegally and downloaded confidential information.
Of course, her conspiracy theory was aimed at the legacy media’s biggest target, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), so Jones was treated as a serious whistleblower by outlets including NPR, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Miami Herald. It did not matter that she had no evidence whatsoever to support her claims or that she had repeatedly violated rules and procedures on the job.
Were Jones a Republican accusing a Democrat of such things, she would be written off as the loon she is (though if she was accusing former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, she would be an actual whistleblower). But, because she was accusing DeSantis, she was a hero and a martyr to the establishment media as the outlets allowed her to build herself up to the point that she could run for Congress.
Democrats will happily prop up conspiracy theorists in congressional runs (hello, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar). Jones’s congressional run would be impossible without Democrats and their media allies trying to dig up anything to take down DeSantis. Conspiracy theories are a bipartisan problem thanks to partisan actors, and Democrats are not immune from it.
