So California held its primaries last week and the counting continues into this week and the next. It became pretty apparent that Spencer Pratt wasn’t going to win the nomination outright and that it was going to take an act of God for him to even make it to a run-off election. This is a heavily Democratic city and he is a Grade A weirdo (more on that in a bit).
Since the only gambit the GOP has left right now is “rigged election” bullshit, the word went out to all the right wing talking heads and soon that nonsense was all over Twitter (always Twitter, never X). And none of the messaging makes sense because everything is a conspiracy to these people, so logic is completely optional.
California always takes a looooooooong time to count ballots. Not only is the time frame mandated by law, but since it is an all mail in ballot election there is an established, thorough process to verify and cure them. I mean, no state completes their ballot count on election night, but generally the big head-to-head races can be called early and life goes on but Trumpers are impervious to facts. But now that all that GOP has left is straight up lying, here we are.
So first there is the basic stuff—just repeat their belief that counting ballots (from non-white people) is suspect.
RAJU: The president keep saying the California election was rigged. What evidence have you seen?SCALISE: You had wide changes after election night in the resultsR: They're just counting the ballotsSCALISE: Look, whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote
And:
JD Vance says it's "shady" for California to count all of the legally cast ballots
Mike Johnson takes it even further, not just a vibe, but the vibe of a vibe:
RAJU: But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?MIKE JOHNSON: Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it's impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.
Personally I find it amazing that the Dems had all of this diabolical power and somehow they didn’t use it to win the 2024 election.
Or they hate Karen Bass but they’re also angry that she now has a more serious challenger, Nithya Raman:
Please note that none of them will mention that a Republican candidate, Steve Hilton, made it to the gubernatorial runoff.
Then they moved into the second degree conspiracy theory.
Yes, I constantly text my mini bio to all of my friends to remind them of who I am—A LIBERAL!!! Who grew up in LIBERAL San Francisco!! And I went to a LIBERAL college!!!. (Although the choice od Madison made me laugh because it’s such a specific kind of liberal reference.)
Another option at this level is citing fake polls, here from a well-known fake pollster who has moved on to a new grift:
Then there was this big brain thinking:
This seems like a good idea in the contextless abstraction of the MAGAt mind. Here in the real world though the Constitution mandates that new Congress elect a Speaker of the House who then swears in the rest of the House en masse. I love that they’re going to go hard on an idea they’re not going to have any chance of implementing.
All of this is even funnier when you look at Spencer Pratt: reality tv alum, magic crystal business owner, and super rich in his own right. He’s angry that his house burned down a few years ago and seems personally invested in making Karen Bass pay. Now apart from the facts—Bass didn’t set his house on fire and it was his personal choice not to insure his house—you might feel sorry for him if you learned that the was living in a (fancy, expensive Airstream) trailer on his house lot. You also might learn that he wasn’t actually living there but instead either at the Hotel Bel-Air or at his family’s lavish beach house in Santa Barbara, which by the way is not in Los Angeles.
I would call Spencer Pratt a clown, but clowns are actually professionals.
But the real reason to hate Pratt is that he’s super cringe and not in the painfully earnest Waltons way. His fans made some of his campaign videos with AI, and he made some. And then there’s this one where a guy wakes up from a coma and finds LA transformed into a whites only paradise:
Subtle.
Now Pratt had no actual shot at winning, but President Grievance endorsed him and the GOP elites talked about him as the second coming of Trump. Even FOX News got on the hype with an article titled The Biggest Threat to JD Vance is Spencer Pratt. No, sorry, I’m being told that was actually a Politico story. Yikes.
And yes, it’s fun to make fun of MAGAt stupidity and sheer lack of creativity, but the drumbeat repetition of the message that “elections (that Democrats win) are rigged” will unfortunately be an issue in the midterms, especially around the California House members. All we can do is keep pointing out facts.
I’ll leave you with this:
