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      'Captain Covid': crowdsurfing Democrat tries to stir Black support for Trump

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      When Vernon Jones, a Black Democratic state representative from Georgia, crossed party lines to deliver a passionate endorsement of Donald Trump at the Republican national convention, the party greeted him like a rock star. Now comes evidence the label has gone to his head.At a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, on Friday night, Jones launched arguably the most ill-advised and dangerous crowdsurf since the electro dance legend Steve Aoki broke a concertgoer’s neck in a dinghy.Thumbs raised and not wearing a mask, the 59-year-old lawmaker launched himself into a mostly maskless audience. Riding a sea of red Maga hats, packed tightly together in contravention of Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention Covid-19 social distancing guidelines, the grinning Jones was passed overhead from deplorable to deplorable, to use a term for Trump supporters Jones cited in a tweet defending the stunt.“Yes, I surfed that crowd!” Jones wrote. “To the haters – stay mad! You’ll be even more mad come 3 November.”On social media, reaction was swift and brutal. One Twitter user dubbed Jones “Captain Covid”. Others denounced him as an idiot and a loser, living in fairytale land.Republicans hope Jones, who was first elected to the Georgia state house in 1992, can help shore up the Black Republican vote in his state. Trump won Georgia from Hillary Clinton by more than five points in 2016, but recent polls show the president trailing Joe Biden by almost one and a half points.Race has also emerged as a key theme in Georgia’s tightly contested US Senate contests, in which both of the Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, hold narrow leads, according to Quinnipiac polling this week.One of the Republican incumbents, David Perdue, was involved in an incendiary moment at Trump’s Macon rally when he mangled the name of Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, the first Black woman on a major party presidential ticket.Perdue’s campaign claimed it was an innocent mistake but Ossoff, in an interview with MSNBC, attacked his opponent for “vile, race-baiting trash talk”.In the other race, a special election in which Warnock, a Black pastor, faces both the Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins, a serving Republican congressman, the spectre of QAnon looms large. Loeffler has embraced the endorsement of the far-right congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enthusiastic peddler of baseless QAnon theories who has expressed racist views in social media posts.At the Republican convention in August, as one of a number of first-night speakers of color to deliver a similar message, Jones tore into Democrats’ handling of racial issues.“Why is a lifelong Democrat speaking at the Republican national convention?” he said, in a controversial speech he later said he intended to be “a culture shock”.“The Democratic party does not want black people to leave their mental plantation. We’ve been forced to be there for decades and generations.”Jones resigned his Georgia House seat in April, after first endorsing Trump. But he rescinded his decision days later, claiming he had received “overwhelming support”. More

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      Trump ally running for Congress believes in baseless QAnon sex-trafficking conspiracy

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      Anywhere but Washington

      Republicans

      Angela Stanton King, who is working to help the president win Black voters, confirmed her views to the Guardian

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      Trump ally running for Congress says she believes baseless QAnon-linked conspiracy theory – video

      A Republican congressional candidate and high-profile ally in Donald Trump’s fight to win over Black voters has admitted to believing a baseless QAnon-related conspiracy theory that the online furniture retailer Wayfair is secretly selling trafficked children over the internet as part of a deep-state plot.
      Angela Stanton King, who is running in Atlanta, Georgia, for the congressional seat once held by the late civil rights icon John Lewis, told the Guardian in an on-camera interview she believed the debunked conspiracy theory while continuing to deny she was a follower of QAnon.
      When asked if she believed the retailer was involved in a global pedophilia conspiracy, she replied: “You know they are. You saw it. You watch the news just like I did.” The candidate then ended the interview, being taped as part of the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series.
      “I don’t know anything about QAnon. You know more than I know,” King said as she walked away.
      Stanton King is one of a number of Republican congressional candidates with ties to the far right, antisemitic conspiracy theory. She has almost no chance of winning her race in Georgia’s fifth congressional district, which has been held by Democrats with overwhelming margins for decades. But elsewhere in the state, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for the 14th congressional district and an outspoken promoter of QAnon, looks set to win a seat in Congress.
      Donald Trump has himself praised QAnon followers as patriots who “love America” and declined opportunities to debunk the false theories.

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      Civil rights and QAnon candidates: the fight for facts in Georgia – video
      Stanton King has used her social media presence to push false theories linked to Qanon, including suggesting that the Black Lives Matter movement is “a major cover up for PEDOPHILIA and HUMAN TRAFFICKING”. She also reiterated a QAnon rallying cry related to the so-called “Storm”, a day of reckoning when, followers believe, Donald Trump will reveal the malefactors in the deep state. “THE STORM IS HERE,” she tweeted on 6 August this year.
      When asked to explain this post, Stanton King once again denied being a follower of the movement and stated: “It was raining that day.”
      Weather reports on 6 August in Atlanta indicate it was hot with no precipitation.
      Advocates on the ground in Georgia and elsewhere have reported an uptick in disinformation associated with the conspiracy theory movement during this election cycle. More

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      US election 2020: mistrust spurring black community to early voting in Georgia – video

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      Thousands of members of Georgia’s black community have come out to vote early in the US election, enduring long lines and hours of waiting. Many acknowledged they could have voted by mail or returned to a polling place at a different time, but with no expectation of voting becoming easier in the weeks to come, they saw waiting as a necessary step. ‘I wanted to make sure that my vote was counted,’ Wilbart McCoy said as he queued to cast his ballot. ‘The suspicions, or the alleged suspicions around mail-in voting, we never had those before but it pushed me to come out early’
      More than 10-hour wait and long lines as early voting starts in Georgia

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      US elections 2020 More

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      More than 10-hour wait and long lines as early voting starts in Georgia

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      Voters in Georgia faced hours-long lines on Monday as people flocked to the polls for the first day of early voting in the state, which has developed a national reputation in recent years for voting issues.Eager voters endured waits of six hours or more in Cobb County, which was once solidly Republican but has voted for Democrats in recent elections, and joined lines that wrapped around buildings in solidly Democratic DeKalb County. They also turned out in big numbers in north Georgia’s Floyd County, where support for Donald Trump is strong.At least two counties briefly had problems with the electronic pollbooks used to check in voters. The issue halted voting for a while at State Farm Arena, in Atlanta. Voters who cast their ballots at the basketball stadium, which was being used as an early voting site, faced long waits as the glitch was resolved.Adrienne Crowley, who waited more than an hour to vote, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution there wasn’t anything that would make her get out of the line to vote. “I would have voted all day if I had to.”Elsewhere in Atlanta, some voters reported waiting more than 10 hours for their chance to cast an early ballot.Voters began lining up outside polling stations in the predawn hours, some using their cellphone flashlights to help other voters fill out pre-registration forms, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.Janine Eveler, the elections and registration director for Cobb County, said the county had prepared as much as much as it could, “but there’s only so much space in the rooms and parking in the parking lot.”“We’re maxing out both of those,” she said. “People are double parking, we have gridlock pretty much in our parking lot,” she added.Hundreds of people slowly moved along a line that snaked back and forth outside Cobb’s main elections office in a suburban area northwest of Atlanta. Good moods seemed to prevail, even though some people said at 1pm that they’d been waiting for six hours. A brief cheer went up when a pizza deliverer brought a pie to someone in line.Steve Davidson, who is Black, said the late US congressman John Lewis and others had fought too long and hard to secure his place at the polls for him to get tired and leave.“They’ve been fighting for decades. If I’ve got to wait six or seven hours, that’s my duty to do that. I’ll do it happily,” Davidson said.Georgia is the latest state to see extremely long lines during the first day of in person voting. Election officials have also seen unprecedented voter turnout on the first day of in-person early voting in states like Virginia and Ohio.With record turnout expected for this year’s presidential election and fears about exposure to the coronavirus, election officials and advocacy groups have been encouraging people to vote early, either in person or by absentee ballot.Nationally, more than 9.4m people have already voted, an unprecedented number, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.Democrats are trying to pick up a US senate seat in Georgia in a race, where the Democratic candidate, Jon Ossoff, is challenging the incumbent Republican, David Perdue.Georgia has long been seen as a Republican bastion, but many believe recent demographic changes have made it a more competitive state. A recent poll shows Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a statistical tie in the state. More

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      QAnon supporter denounced for racism wins Georgia Republican primary

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman who has expressed racist views and support for the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, has won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th congressional district.Greene beat the neurosurgeon John Cowan in a primary runoff for the open seat on Tuesday in the deep-red district in north-west Georgia, despite several Republican officials denouncing her campaign after videos surfaced in which she expressed racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim views.She has amassed tens of thousands of followers on social media, where she often posts videos of herself speaking directly to the camera. Those videos have helped propel her popularity with her base, while also drawing strong condemnation from some future would-be colleagues in Congress.In a series of videos unearthed just after Greene placed first in the initial 9 June Republican primary, she complains of an “Islamic invasion” into government offices, claims Black and Hispanic men are held back by “gangs and dealing drugs”, and pushes an antisemitic conspiracy theory that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, collaborated with the Nazis.Several high-profile Republicans then spoke out against her. The House minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, quickly threw his support behind Cowan, while Representative Jody Hice of Georgia rescinded an endorsement of Greene.Greene addressed criticism of her comments on Twitter. “The Fake News Media, the DC Swamp, and their radical leftist allies see me as a very serious threat. I will not let them whip me into submission,” she said, without distancing herself from her earlier remarks.Greene also is part of a growing list of candidates who have expressed support for QAnon, the far-right US conspiracy theory popular among some supporters of Donald Trump. She is regarded as one of the QAnon supporters with the best chance of winning in November.She has positioned herself as a staunch Trump supporter and emphasizes a strongly pro-gun, pro-border wall and anti-abortion message. She has also connected with voters through an intensive effort to travel the district and meet people on the ground.Larry Silker, a 72-year-old retiree, cast a ballot for Greene last week at an early voting location in Dallas, Georgia.“She seems to be a go-getter, you know. She’s out seeing everybody that she can, and I think that’s nice,” Silker said.Asked whether he had seen criticism of Greene’s remarks, Silker said: “Well yeah, you know, you see it. But do you put faith in it? You just have to weigh it out.”The district stretches from the outskirts of metro Atlanta to the largely rural north-west corner of the state. Greene will face the Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal in November. The Republican representative Tom Graves, who did not seek re-election, last won the seat with over 76% of the vote in 2018.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      A moving ‘Amazing Grace’ performance for Congressman John Lewis – video

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      US lawmakers were visibly moved while singer Wintley Phipps delivered his performance of ‘Amazing Grace’ in the Capitol Rotunda for the late congressman John Lewis. A Democratic member from Atlanta since 1987, Lewis endured numerous beatings and arrests in his lifelong fight against segregation and for racial justice. He died on 17 July of pancreatic cancer at age 80
      John Lewis: voice of civil rights leader rings out one final time at lying-in-state

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