Source Of Fox Rigged Election Claim Your Typical Election Expert Who Says She's A Ghost

Maria Bartiromo said it sounded 'kooky,' did not let that stop her!

Sometimes we lie awake at night and ponder an important question: Is Fox News secretly a giant immersive sitcom project written by Tina Fey? Are these people real? Are we being Truman Show’d here?

We cannot rule out the possibility, especially after reading the latest revelation from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox, as summed up by the Daily Beast :

 [The email] may be the alleged source of the voter-fraud claims that sparked the lawsuit: a single email from a previously unknown woman who was convinced, among other things, that late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport. [...]

“Justice Scalia wasn’t accidentally shot during a hunting trip,” her email read. “He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp. A club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever.”
 

Perhaps a journalist might be wary about running with "stolen election" theories promulgated by a woman who, in the very same email in which she shared those theories, claimed "that she had been 'internally decapitated' during a car accident" and was also a ghost.

The email was the brainchild of a Minnesota artist named Marlene Bourne, who told the Beast’s Will Sommer that her theories about the voter fraud that allegedly cost Donald Trump the 2020 election come from a “wide variety of sources, including hidden messages she detects in films, song lyrics she hears on the radio, and overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.”

Oh sure, the supermarket checkout, that’s where we also get all of our world-changing globe-spanning conspiracy theories, along with our deli meat.

The theories in the email made it from Bourne to Fox’s airwaves via the first person she sent it to, noodle-brained lawyer Sidney Powell, who forwarded it on to Fox host and gibbering giant novelty lips Maria Bartiromo, who read it, recognized it as “kooky,” and ran with it anyway.

Sayeth the email (and these are just a couple of its claims):

• “A piece of code was inserted such that, once ballots were fed into the database for tabulation, up to 3% of votes for Mr. Trump would automatically switch to Mr. Biden; this was capped at 3% because it was supposedly determined that anything higher than that would raise suspicions.”

• “You’d think that kind of hugely important software would developed and managed by a US company (or the US government itself). but...no, it's based in Spain. Which means t's the Spanish who decide who wins our elections and who doesn’t. Or do they? It's a bit of a corporate shell game (with hundreds of companies involved) and while it appears that the ultimate parent company is actually British, I find it interesting that the owner is French.”

So … it wasn’t the Italian intelligence service beaming satellite signals through China-made thermostats in polling places? Damn, we hate to revise our manifesto, but we can't question the secret messages encoded in supermarket checkout line chatter.

More email:

• “The paper used to print those [absentee ballots] does NOT have a special watermark as is being reported: instead, the paper fibers were embedded with anti-counterfeiting security features to detect fraud... much like how the Treasury embeds security features into paper money. I'll bet it’s digital DNA -nanotechnology.”

• “[A]re you award (sic) that Mr. Ailes, Mr. Murdoch, and the handful of other (non-US) owners of the major US media outlets secretly huddle most days to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible? The global hatred of the man has everything to do with the fact that, as a political outsider, Mr. Trump has disrupted a well-oiled global money laundering operation.”

At this point – which is not too far past halfway through the email – you don’t need to be even a semi-responsible journalist to realize this thing has no merit whatsoever. You just have to be sane and/or not in the middle of ripping an entire crate of whip-its to recognize that the allegations belong nowhere outside of a Psychology Today article.

Bourne did not include even one piece of evidence to back up her assertions because obviously none existed. Nonetheless:

 The next day, Fox aired a pre-taped interview with Bartiromo and Powell on Bartiromo’s show,   Sunday Morning Futures  . The segment appears to be based in large part on Bourne’s email--in Bartiromo’s deposition, she was unable to point to another source for Powell’s ideas. […] Bartiromo referenced false claims that she would have read a day earlier in Bourne’s email. At times, Bartiromo even used identical phrasing to Bourne’s email. 

We have consulted Wonkette’s in-house counsel, who tells us that for Dominion to succeed in this lawsuit, it must prove actual malice. Did Bartiromo know it was reckless to air these allegations? Well, we don’t see how you read an email sent by a woman who also tells you in that same email that she comes by her information by experiencing “time-travel in a semi-conscious state” and that she “listens to the wind,” which tells her that she is a ghost who was “internally decapitated” in a car accident in 1992, and not come to that conclusion.

But then again, we’re not Maria Bartiromo, nor are we desperately thirsty for ratings and Donald Trump's approval, nor are we a giant fucking idiot.

We keep picturing Dominion’s lawyers stumbling across this email in a big pile of discovery material and celebrating by diving into giant piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. Go ahead and splurge on those solid-gold humidors, boys. We suspect you’re going to be good for 'em.

[ The Daily Beast ]

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