1/23/2024 0 Comments Mtg slide runner“George Soros is behind a conspiracy to destroy America. Last night Marjorie went on a posting spree,” Michael said. “Okay, first, an update on the current state of the race. He brought in a national consultant named Michael McGraw, whose firm specialized in long-shot bids, and now the new team was on a video call laying out a revised strategy to present to Kevin. “America needs you Kevin!!” another person wrote.Īs more people began following the campaign, Vinny realized he was going to need help, so he hired a deputy campaign manager named Ruth Demeter. “We need earnest people in Washington to solve real problems - not conspiracy nuts!” someone else wrote. “Vote for Kevin! He’s a regular dude!!” one person posted on Kevin’s campaign Facebook page. That was his plan, and meanwhile, in the days after Greene, who declined to comment for this story, became the Republican candidate, interest in the race grew far beyond the borders of Georgia as more and more people began realizing that the alternative to Greene was a guy named Kevin Van Ausdal. As he told Vinny soon after hiring him as campaign manager, “People say I’m a nice guy, and I am. He would talk about jobs and health care. He would counter her extremism with moderation. It is an outcome that was in some ways years in the making, as all but the most committed Democrats in northwestern Georgia had long become Republican, or abandoned hope of winning the mostly White, mostly rural district of gun shops and churches, leaving the Democratic Party so weak that in 2018, the nominee for Congress was a man who had run a nudist retreat.īut as Greene gave a victory speech railing against the “hate-America left” and calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “b-,” Kevin sensed an opening. Thirty-one days later it was over, and within those 31 days is a chronicle of how one candidate representing the most extreme version of American politics is heading to Congress with no opposition, and the other is, in his words, “broken.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican candidate in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, at a rally in Rome, Ga., on Aug. He read about an FBI memo warning that QAnon followers could pose a domestic terrorism threat, and the reality sank in that the only thing standing between Marjorie Taylor Greene and the halls of Congress was him. He plunged deeper, reading about a world in which a cryptic online figure called Q is fighting to take down a network of Democrats, Hollywood actors and global elites who engage in child-trafficking and drink a life-extending chemical harvested from the blood of their victims. “And JFK’s ghost? Or maybe he’s still alive? And QAnon is working with Trump to fight the deep state? I’m not sure I understand.” “I’ve seen some mention of lizard people?” Kevin said, going through news articles to learn more about QAnon. He read that she was wealthy, had rented a condo in the district earlier in the year to run for Congress, and that before running she had built an online following by promoting baseless, fringe right-wing conspiracies - that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been involved in murders, that President Obama is a Muslim, and more recently, about the alternate universe known as QAnon. Publicity material for Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal’s run for Congress. He hired a local campaign manager named Vinny Olsziewski, who had handled school board races and a couple of congressionals. So one day in March, he drove his Honda to the gold-domed state capitol in Atlanta, used his IRS refund to pay the $5,220 filing fee and became the only Democrat running for a House seat in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which Donald Trump won by 27 points in the 2016 presidential election. He had not yet punched a wall, or been labeled a “communist,” or a person “who’d probably cry like a baby if you put a gun in his face.” He did not yet know who was going to be the Republican nominee for Congress in his conservative district in northwestern Georgia: the well-known local neurosurgeon, or the woman he knew vaguely as a person who had openly promoted conspiracies including something about a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.Īnything still seemed possible in the spring of 2020, including the notion that he, Kevin Van Ausdal, a 35-year-old political novice who wanted to “bring civility back to Washington” might have a shot at becoming a U.S. There was a time when Kevin Van Ausdal had not yet been called a “loser” and “a disgrace” and hustled out of Georgia.
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