Polk's voter fraud grifters are not normal people

We AINOs everywhere need to take back our public spaces and public good from the fake voter fraud grift and gross public obsessions of Steve Maxwell and Jimmy Nelson's CCDF.

My observations of the so-called “County Citizens Defending Freedom” lead me to this hypothesis: they think much more than normal people do about stealing elections they lost; supporting Capitol lynch mob coups; and finding anal sex references everywhere.

The latest example: CCDF is trying to mount a Polk County version of one of those freak show, Arizona-style fake election “audits.” These fake, unsupervised audits are designed to discredit elections the Republican Party loses, harass voters, and cast lying aspersions upon the officials those same voters select to do their jobs.

In Polk Supervisor Lori Edwards’ case, 77 percent of Polk County voters (including me) put her back in office in 2020 because she has done a good, honest job for a very long time. CCDF and other similar fake “grassroots” groups — which are part of a very well-funded national network — don’t remotely care. They have no respect for representative self-government or the judgement of voters — at the local or national level. They spit right in our faces.

CCDF-type groups and the nastiest parts of the Trump/Saga/Desantis factions of Republican Party keep lying about the 2020 election to indulge their fantasies, grift their people, and extend the Stop the Steal scam that led to the Capitol Lynch Mob.

They are a tiny national minority; but their capacity to dominate public spaces (like School Board meetings) and wear out normal people presents a massive hurdle to “moving forward” as a country and community.

Before the fake voter fraud, it was the fake anal sex diagram and the coup general

This voter “audit” story comes just days after I documented how lustily the CCDF bought its anus obsessions to the Polk School Board.

Indeed, the CCDF thinks about and talks about anal sex in public so much that the Polk School District was forced to say this in public in response:

When asked on Wednesday if anal sex is taught in Polk County Public Schools, spokesman Kyle Kennedy said, “The answer is no; we don’t ‘teach anal sex.’” 

And before all that anusing, I documented the CCDF’s fund-raising love affair with Capital Lynch Mob coup advocate — and disgraced former general/convicted felon — Michael Flynn.

In short, these are not normal people doing normal civic/political/community/parent advocacy things. Listen to CCDF founder Steve Maxwell declaring war on anybody who thinks differently than he does about masking — and basically anything else:

He insisted that the mask mandate marked a divide between two Americas: one made of “real Americans” who believed in “real American values” such as those enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and “Americans In-Name Only,” or AINOs, who remain complicit with “globalists” and “Big Tech” to “radically change” America.

AINOs. LOL.

Even when Steve Maxwell draws fantasy civil war battle lines against his fellow Americans and figuratively strips them of citizenship, he turns it into a Beavis and Butthead joke.

Normal people don’t go around calling people AINOs to try to intimidate them.

Keep your dark “AINO” fantasies out of our public spaces

Indeed, carrying around obsessions about AINOs all day sounds like a pretty miserable existence to me. I would not want my waking thoughts consumed by sorting my neighbors into AINO and non-AINO piles of humanity.

But CCDFer dark fantasies aren’t really my business.

I’m content for the Steve Maxwells, Jimmy Nelsons, Hannah Petersons, Saga Stevins, etc. of the world to sit around daydreaming about lynch mob coups and anal sex if that’s what they need to get through the day — as long as it doesn’t affect me and my family or harm my community.

But here’s the problem: they won’t stay out of my public business or yours.

The CCDF’s Capitol Lynch Mob coup and anal sex fantasies keep spilling over into public realms they share with me and the rest of the normal people in our community. They keep intruding on our shared space with stupidity and malice.

For instance, here is Polk GOP leader JC Martin yukking it up with big Jan. 6-inciter and convicted felon Roger Stone after the Capitol Lynch Mob.

You can read the whole Gary White story about the loser “audit” if you want. But there’s no actual content to the story but grift and invasion of public space. The CCDF doesn’t care what’s true; it cares what it can scream about to dominate you. Polk GOP leader JC Martin and the CCDF — like their convicted felon idols Roger Stone and Michael Flynn — are only concerned about “election integrity” if they don’t win.

That’s all this is — a big grifty toddler fit.

And I assure you, the second these people drop their anus-trolling and act like normal, constructive citizens, not marauding selfish banshees of public spaces and public good, I will stop writing about them.

For now, they won’t get out of all of our faces, which means we have to get in theirs or surrender to them. It’s a zero sum game, unfortunately, with Capitol Lynch Mob coup supporters and anus-trollers.

Listen to Publix, Barney Barnett, and Nancy Jenkins

Encouragingly, important people in our community — particularly those with economic and social capital — appear to be waking up to the nature of this zero-sum game with coup supporters and anus-trollers.

Bill Mutz’s recent 67-33 trouncing of CCDF favorite Saga Stevin in the Lakeland mayoral race is one indicator.

Young Big Capital in our community, led by Publix heir Wesley Barnett, backed Bill Mutz strongly — and with organization and moral support even more than checks. Wesley didn’t buy the race; he influenced it in the old fashioned way — with public advocacy. That’s how it should be.

Wesley’s politically active father, Barney Barnett, after a period of quiet, also came around to publicly pick the constructive, expansive citizenship side in what was a localized referendum on the direction of the Republican Party.

That Lakeland GOP referendum was inconclusive because Democrats and independents flocked to Mutz’s glasnost vision of the GOP and gave him his massive margin. Perhaps the GOP should note that fact and purge the JC Martin/Roger Stone/CCDF/Q-Anon wing from its leadership, rather than sucking up to them like Scott Franklin has with lecherous inheritance baby Matt Gaetz. (Looking at you Alice and James. Is this always just gonna stand?)

Drawing important civic lines

Perhaps more importantly, Publix and the Barnetts recently began to draw some fairly stark and public behavioral lines among their allies and family on “the right,” if that meaningless word has any meaning.

The venue was a Washington Post article about Julie Jenkins Fancelli’s financial support for the Stop the Steal rally that turned into the Capital Lynch Mob. It’s a deeper dive on information reported before.

But the blunt Publix/Barnett/Jenkins family repudiation of the grifty, violent, menacing Jan. 6 GOP ecosystem that Mrs. Fancelli became part of was new and welcome.

Here are three important passages from the article:

After an initial report a few weeks after the rally that Fancelli had donated about $300,000, Publix released a statement saying that she was not involved in the business and that it could not comment on her actions. Last week, after The Post inquired about Fancelli’s contributions totaling $650,000, the company went further, saying it “cannot control the actions of individual stockholders” and issued an unusual rebuke of a member of the founder’s family.

“We are deeply troubled by Ms. Fancelli’s involvement in the events that led to the tragic attack on the Capitol on January 6,” Publix said in a statement to The Post.

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Fancelli’s sister Nancy Jenkins said they avoid talking politics and stick to topics like “the grandchildren and the nieces and nephews and how long she’s coming to Florida for Christmas.”

Of Jones, Jenkins said: “He’s kind of a rabble rouser, and I don’t listen to that. I listen to the regular news. That guy is crazy. Everybody knows Trump lost.”

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“I am not tantalized by that fellow, but apparently she is, and a lot of other people are addicted, to the detriment of the country,” Fancelli’s brother-in-law Barney Barnett, a retired Publix executive who describes himself as a conservative Republican, said in a recent interview with The Post. “Julie is one of the finest people I know, and I am sorry she got tied up with this guy.”

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Barnett and Jenkins are referring specifically to Sandy Hook-denier and key Jan. 6 figure Alex Jones, of “Infowars” infamy. But Jones is just one node of the Jan. 6 “alt-right” or “Q-Anon-right” drug — or whatever you want to call it — to which so many people have become “addicted,” as Barney Barnett aptly put it. Indeed, if I could write a quote for Barney Barnett to say about that world, it would look much like that one.

Publix and the Barnetts had pretty well-documented political and civic differences with me in the 2020 election. But who cares?

I want to share a civic coalition with them — and everybody else — within which we can resolve political and power differences on the merits. Yes, that’s naive and idealistic. I’m both of those things in my way. But the direct language used in those public comments is a good step in that idealistic direction; and I want to praise them for it.

(I also offer my condolences on the recent passing of Carol Jenkins Barnett — wife to Barney, mother to Wesley and Nick, and sister to Nancy Jenkins.)

If only Sheriff Grady Judd would speak as frankly to his political base.

Dear Lori: you won 77% of the vote. Tell these CCDFers to win an election or pound sand

Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards outperformed Trump by 21 percentage points in red Polk County in 2020. She beat her well-known, Republican activist opponent 77-23.

That’s an even greater beating than Lakeland Mayor Bill Mutz laid to Saga.

The voting public made a clear, decisive choice. And I find that the voting and living public is generally more reasonable than we give each other credit for.

People who go around calling their neighbors AINOs are not reasonable. They deserve no special consideration from my supervisor of elections. They deserve no indulgence from “mainstream” reporters. In fact, I think Gary White’s story is too credulous and too tolerant of the CCDF grift. It’s an ongoing journalism problem, not unique to Gary — the inability or unwillingness because of convention to use plain language to describe anus people. The respectability norms of journalism media-wash the Steve Maxwells of the world far too easily.

Make CCDFers go run campaigns on anuses and Capitol Lynch Mob coups and actually win an election. They tried that once in Lakeland and got demolished. Lori Edwards is multiples more popular than any of them.

We reasonable AINOs should stop thinking of them as anything but a malicious nuisance to confront, laugh at, and defeat — politically, culturally, and civically.