Oddio! Crackpots Now Convinced Italy Stole Election From Trump!

A very confused essplainer! Viva Italia!

Buongiorno miei cari! It is a lovely day today. It is the day that the Electoral College will be officially certified (we will liveblog it!), and there is really nothing anyone can do about that. It is, of course, going to be a great disappointment to the many MAGA creeps gathered in DC and around the country, especially those who still believe with their whole heart that Mike Pence can just step in and declare Donald Trump the winner of the election and President for Life.

Many of them are, unsurprisingly, grasping at straws. And one of those straws is a theory that Italy — yes, Italy — is responsible for stealing the election from poor Donald Trump. With like ... satellites?

AND NOW, #ItalyDidIt is trending on Twitter. Though to be fair, a very large percentage of those tweets are coming from Italians who think it is very hilarious that anyone thinks Italy got it together to rig the American election.

y’all think italy sabotaged the election? bro our government doesn’t even know how to sabotage themselves… https: //t.co/IiwpR8FW4p

— ada (@ada) 1609929757.0 

#italydidit When as an Italian I feel that we have managed to hack the USA, despite the fact that we cannot have in… https: //t.co/dR3i7mqwry

— Alessio (@Alessio) 1609934247.0 

And also people congratulating Italy on inventing all of the best foods.

I think we should fill this trend with things Italians have done like #italydidit https: //t.co/FK3H9cclY4

— Melainia_ (@Melainia_) 1609928606.0 

You may be wondering who the fuck Ann Vandersteel — the SteelKRAKEN! — even is and where the fuck this is all coming from. Allow me to explain!

Vandersteel is a Pizzagate lady turned QAnon lady who hosts an "investigative journalism" show called "SteelTruthTM" and made the news a couple years ago after claiming that she was on Trump's 2020 advisory board when she was not.

Ann Vandersteel spent two hours today on "The Patriots' Soapbox" livsestream talking QAnon/child sex trafficking/pe… https: //t.co/O4wrQze9AA

— Right Wing Watch (@Right Wing Watch) 1547757489.0 

This led to the Trump campaign having to issue a denial and say that she is not and was never a member of any advisory board . Guess they really missed out!

Vandersteel did not come up with this herself, it's the telephone game version of some nonsense that has been circulating among some QAnon people for a month or so about German servers and a CIA raid and MURDER. 

The "Dominion voting machine server farm battle" story has been popular among QAnon followers since November. Many… https: //t.co/IxycWnUJpS

— allie mezei (@allie mezei) 1609921770.0 

What Vandersteel is referring to is a new version of that scenario (with less murder), most prominently coming from Brad Johnson, a guy who writes for the Epoch Times, a wacky far-Right fake news site, and claims to be a former CIA official and spy but is almost definitely not a former CIA official or spy. It's just really easy to pretend to work or have worked for the CIA because it's not like the CIA is gonna confirm or deny that. He is probably a former CIA official like Ann Vandersteel was a Trump campaign surrogate and member of his 2020 advisory board.

From what I can tell, from various sources (by which I mean the Twitter feeds of the people who believe this crap), this is the gist of what they think happened. Back in 2017, Barack Obama got $400 million together and transferred it to different accounts all over the world, all to "unravel the Trump presidency."

It's not clear if that's what they think happened with the $400 million in the Iran deal, or if it was another $400 million altogether. But somehow this led to the hatching of an evil master plan involving Germany, Italy, and THIS GUY.

Some random guy, he is definitely involved, SOMEHOW! 

And, of course, Dominion voting machines.

According to Johnson, on election night, you could see everything going towards Trump, and that is when all of the evil Trump-hating people started panicking . So they froze the five swing states where Trump lost and sent the information from the Dominion voting machines — which were hooked up to the internet — to a Dominion server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, where some CIA guys were supposed to work a little algorithm magic and send the information back, but their algorithm didn't account for Trump getting all the votes.

So what they did was, they sent that money to the US embassy in Italy. And there were people there. Like that guy in the mask. And they looked at the raw data and the US Deep State and were like "Oh no! This can't happen! Trump is getting all of the votes!"

And thus, a new plan was born!

The problem was that the algorithms were overloaded, so what they had planned on didn't work because Trump got so many votes. And he got a record number of votes, I mean, among Blacks and Hispanics, everybody voted for Trump. and that skewed all of the algorithms, so what they had planned didn't work. That's why everything had to be shut down.

So they upload all of the stuff, it gives them time to analyze all this and to create new analogs that would then allow the vote to come out in favor of Biden.

So they did that and then sent all of the new information back to the United States with Italian military satellites, provided by Italian military contractor Leonardo. This was, apparently, all part of Obama's plan and Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, was involved somehow, though that's never actually explained. They just know they were in cahoots. Somehow.

Johnson also claims this is "dominating" the news in Italy, which it's not. Like it's not even sort of a thing. There was one article saying that Trump's lawyers think Italy was involved in stealing the election from him, in La Veritas, a not-terribly-popular conservative newspaper, but that's about it.

I can read Italian well enough — but I cannot read anything other than the headline on that article, because the text is very small and super blurry, and I'm gonna guess that no one else did, either. Including "Kenekoa" up there. I also did a quick search of Corriere della Sera and La Republicca , two of the major Italian newspapers and it does not seem as though they have mentioned it at all .

It's clear why this is an appealing scenario for these stunad Trump supporters to believe in, especially the part about how he won all of the Black and Hispanic votes (because that is a thing one can tell from looking at ballot data). They'll believe anything at this point, especially if the words "Dominion," "algorithm," "tapes" and "satellites" are thrown around a lot. They'll take whatever they can get, even if it doesn't result in Trump's losing, because they at least want to be comforted by the idea that literally every person in the country voted for him.

But unless you're talking about delicious food, being super hot, or singing opera, I'm gonna have to say #ItalyDidNotDoIt.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!