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How a Fake Whistleblower Peddled Lies About Florida’s COVID Deaths
New York Post ^ | May 13, 2021 | Charles C.W. Cooke

Posted on 05/13/2021 11:26:25 AM PDT by nickcarraway

This is a story about Rebekah Jones, a former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health (FDOH), who has single-handedly managed to convince millions of Americans that Gov. Ron DeSantis has been fudging the state’s COVID-19 data.

When I write “single-handedly,” I mean it, for Jones is not one of the people who have advanced this conspiracy theory but rather is the person who has advanced this conspiracy theory. It has been repeated by others, sure: by partisans across the internet, by unscrupulous Florida Democrats such as Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist, and on television, by MSNBC in particular. But it flows from a single place: Rebekah Jones. To understand that is to understand the whole game. This is about Jones, and Jones alone. If she falls, it falls.

And boy does it deserve to fall. Jones’ central claim is nothing less dramatic than that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy in the third-most populous state in the nation, and that, having done so, she has been ruthlessly persecuted by the governor and his “Gestapo.”

(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; News/Current Events; US: Florida
KEYWORDS: agitprop; charlescwcooke; covid; dashboard; desantis; fdoh; fl; florida; rebekahjones; stats; warondesantis; warontrump

1 posted on 05/13/2021 11:26:25 AM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: nickcarraway

Even more amazing is how Forbes promptly declared her to be a “data scientist” and then declared her “Tech Person of Year”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/helenpopkin/2020/12/26/forbes-technology-awards-2020-geeks-step-up-when-governments-fail/?sh=471379cd7088

What the hell happened to Forbes? Fake news doesn’t get more fake than this.


2 posted on 05/13/2021 11:38:09 AM PDT by PGR88
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To: PGR88

I think your question is a rhetorical question because we already know the real answer...

DeSantis is a powerhouse among Republicans, the liberals something to attack him with, she provided it, regardless of her problems they were going to run with her story...

She is a fraud and has proven to be a fraud to the point the Democrats have stopped using her as a source to attack DeSantis...


3 posted on 05/13/2021 11:42:07 AM PDT by srmanuel (`)
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To: nickcarraway
Your thread has a different source...I just posted this today on another thread on the same subject at https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3958866/posts:

There was this snippet talking about her:

"...The next day, on May 7, 2020, Jones crashed the dashboard. Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department’s IT staff. “Because the team was not informed,” Curry wrote, it “began troubleshooting the issue as if it were a system issue”—which, of course, it was not..."

And this one, a week later:

"...In the process, the FDOH asked Chris Duclos, a GIS manager and the only other person besides Jones who had “full administrative right [sic] in our system[,] to help.” This Duclos did, primarily “by modifying ownership of objects to return the process to the previous state”—that is, to roll back the system to how it had been when it was working. At 1:00 p.m. that day, aware that Duclos was reversing her power grab, Jones locked Duclos out of his account.

"...By 1:35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos’s full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would, and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi. Except . . . she didn’t. Instead, as Curry recorded, Jones set Duclos’s permissions to a lower level than administrator, and left herself as the sole person within the FDOH who had administrator status. In response, Duclos emailed the state’s GIS vendor and re­quested that his full permissions be restored..."

In my world, if you did these things, you would get walked out with a cardboard box. How did they keep her there even one day longer after the first incident?

4 posted on 05/13/2021 11:43:06 AM PDT by rlmorel (Leftists are The Droplet of Sewage in a gallon of ultra-pure clean water.)
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To: nickcarraway

I wonder how many other completely dishonest “whistleblowers” are out there trying to ruin people’s lives and collecting big bucks through “Go Fund Me” accounts. No matter how much evidence there is of their lies, does Twitter, etc, ever put them out?


5 posted on 05/13/2021 11:47:46 AM PDT by Freee-dame
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>> When I write “single-handedly,” I mean i

single-handedly is not much different than anecdotal.


6 posted on 05/13/2021 12:02:59 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: rlmorel

From the spelling of her name i would guess that she is a person of “color”.


7 posted on 05/13/2021 12:03:40 PM PDT by BiteYourSelf ( Earth first we'll strip mine the other planets later.)
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To: BiteYourSelf
No, she's white

Fired Florida COVID-19 data scientist Rebekah Jones arrested and charged with illegal access to state computer

8 posted on 05/13/2021 12:08:34 PM PDT by PapaBear3625 ("Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire)
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To: nickcarraway

Is the NY Post finally jumping off the COVID fear bandwagon?


9 posted on 05/13/2021 12:12:30 PM PDT by Socon-Econ (adical Islam, )
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To: nickcarraway

The threat of exposure of the generally accepted COVID death statistics as false, is presumably the motivation for this kind of fallacious trolling by the corrupt DemLeft woke jokers. They figure that they can forestall this exposure. So. they lie. What else is new? Won’t make any difference, and if the MSM runs with this, their complete lack of credibility will finally begin to bite. No surprise.


10 posted on 05/13/2021 12:16:07 PM PDT by Richard Axtell ( NO*)
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To: BiteYourSelf

It only takes one click on the provided link to answer your question. Never assume.


11 posted on 05/13/2021 12:31:16 PM PDT by skr (May God confound the enemy)
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To: PapaBear3625

Huh I guessed wrong.🤗


12 posted on 05/13/2021 12:56:04 PM PDT by BiteYourSelf ( Earth first we'll strip mine the other planets later.)
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To: skr

What,you expect me to break tradition and read the article?🤗


13 posted on 05/13/2021 12:57:20 PM PDT by BiteYourSelf ( Earth first we'll strip mine the other planets later.)
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To: PGR88

Forbes has been leftist for at least the past several years. It’s almost unbearably so these days. Nauseatingly committed to DEI, for example. (I was given a subscription.)


14 posted on 05/13/2021 2:39:32 PM PDT by PersonOfNo Consequence
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To: nickcarraway

“single-handedly”

Yeah—With a huge assist from the media.


15 posted on 05/13/2021 3:40:42 PM PDT by Arm_Bears (Hey, Rocky--Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!)
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To: rlmorel; nickcarraway; Liz; SunkenCiv; LS

We no longer in a meritocracy, nor even a bureaucracy (where “You follow the rules, you keep working ‘til you retire to safety.”
Now, it is strictly a “Woke Lives Matter”, touchy-feely, “Be an activist” with the right skin color and (most important) the “right attitude” towards the dictatorship, and you will be protected by power.
/who killed Ashli Babbit ?

Yes, a insider’s dictatorship


16 posted on 05/13/2021 4:08:28 PM PDT by Robert A Cook PE (Method, motive, and opportunity: No morals, shear madness and hatred by those who cheat.)
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To: BiteYourSelf

I understand, sometimes the motivation to click on yet another link simply isn’t there, lol


17 posted on 05/14/2021 3:36:48 AM PDT by skr (May God confound the enemy)
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To: nickcarraway
Drew Holden offers up a thread explaining how Rebekah Jones’s grift went on for so long

‘If you believe her, you’re the mark’: Charles C.W. Cooke exposes Florida COVID-19 ‘fabulist’ Rebekah Jones

18 posted on 05/14/2021 3:46:00 AM PDT by mewzilla (Those aren't masks. They're muzzles. )
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To: PGR88

Check out the ownership of Forbes.


19 posted on 05/14/2021 3:47:14 AM PDT by mewzilla (Those aren't masks. They're muzzles. )
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