The sickness infecting America
Conspiracies abound, election lies are ingrained, the people who are infected think they're actually the cure.
There is a sickness in America. It can be contracted by accident, but it can also be purposefully ingested into the bloodstream. It infects people regardless of their sex, race, or occupation. It can take time to overtake one’s life, or it can change a person quickly. It has many names but its most common symptom is belief. Its primary cause is fear.
Millions of Americans spend their days believing in sweeping conspiracies — that elections are definitely rigged, that there is a master plan by unseen forces for world domination, that regular people are the targets of these schemes — because of their downright terror that the world, as it inevitably does, is changing. They wrap themselves in these beliefs and, as they come to believe them more and more, take action.
It was almost a year ago when I read a story that sent me down a path I could not possibly have predicted. That journey resulted in my story for Rolling Stone about how a group of pro-Trump Republicans drunk on election lies took over elections in their small town. The past year has also provided me with a greater understanding of the fear that drives so many of my fellow Americans to believe the unbelievable, carry out the unthinkable and exist in an alternate reality that, often, there is no coming back from.
“The Spalding board’s new chairman has endorsed former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims on social media,” read a December 2021 Reuters report about the head of the Spalding County Board of Elections and Registration, Ben Johnson.
So I looked Johnson up. Soon, I was thrust into a world of far-right conspiracy theories thanks to Johnson’s prolific rants on a variety of social media networks, including Gab, online home of the extreme right, white supremacist wing of the Republican party. I was familiar with some of Johnson’s unhinged beliefs. In May 2021, I attended a QAnon conference in Dallas. There, former national security advisor Mike Flynn called for a Myanmar-style coup here in America. (Since then, Flynn has embarked upon the ReAwaken America Tour, where the dark and inevitable end of the conspiracies that Johnson subscribes to is made apparent — Christian nationalist zealotry, political violence in the name of fending off the progressive change that prompts the disease of conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory, and a bizarre fixation on Donald Trump as a messianic figure.) Simply put, I have known about QAnon, election denialism, and the larger ecosystem of far-right conspiracies for years now. Still, what I saw in Johnson’s posts shocked me. I was shocked not because of the beliefs themselves — as insane as they are — but because of who Johnson is. He’s an upstanding member of his community who runs a successful business located right on Main Street in the small town where he lives. Well-connected in the local Republican party, he has served in at least two government positions — to which he was appointed by his own party — over the past 20 years.
Cruise Johnson’s Facebook page and you’ll see the devastating results of misinformation and conspiracies. Sporting a brain broken by the extremely online far-right, Johnson could have easily wound up attacking the Capitol on January 6, if he had been there. But unlike many of his fellow online conspiracy theorists, Johnson isn’t just some anonymous Twitter troll with a right-wing meme for an avatar. (Although he does often fit that description with his childlike online behavior — just see his latest profile photo.) Instead, Johnson owns a business on Main Street that holds contracts with the very county government for which he works. He is involved in local Republicans politics, rubbing elbows with his party superiors in state government. In other words, none of the insane things Johnson posts on a daily basis have resulted in any negative consequences from the community in which he lives.
What is so disturbing is not that Johnson holds such extreme beliefs, but that those beliefs are apparently so widespread that he is accepted as a normal figure within his community. After realizing how much of an extremist Johnson was, I realized I had to look into what was happening in Spalding County. What I found there surprised even me.
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Start digging in any small town and you are bound to discover its sins. What surprised me so much about Spalding County and its seat, Griffin, was how quickly those sins became apparent. Griffin chief of police Mike Yates has been run out of two towns prior to taking the top law enforcement job there. In Americus, Georgia, Yates was accused of conducting an illegal background check on a local NAACP member. Yates went on to become police chief in Jonesboro, Ark., where he oversaw the extremely questionable in-custody death of Chavis Carter, who allegedly shot and killed himself in the back of a squad car in 2012 with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Yates went on to disparage a reporter as “smelly” and a “left wing liberal” for her critical coverage of police. He then resigned before arriving in Griffin to take his job as the city’s top cop. In Griffin, Yates was chief when one of his officers may have shot his wife in the head with his service weapon. The officer was never arrested for the crime.
“It seems like this city and county is a cesspool for people with horrific pasts,” Ray Harps-Muhammed, a local activist, told me in April.
But Yates is just the beginning. County commissioner Don Hawbaker was suspended in 2020 after being indicted for murder. The year prior, former cop and current county commissioner Gregory Ryan Bowlden was indicted for his involvement in an in-custody death while working as a police officer in a nearby town. Last year, county manager Steve Ledbetter, who is also the former mayor of nearby Woodbury, created a new law enforcement position in Spalding County that he immediately filled with Woodbury’s former police chief, Smart Web. What Ledbetter didn’t say in public meetings is that he and the Web allegedly collaborated to sabotage Woodbury’s incoming mayor by taking computers out of city hall, selling police vehicles, and deleting records from the town’s traffic court, according to my sources in the area. Ledbetter and Web are now under investigation by the GBI.
There is also the rampant poverty and lack of jobs on the black side of town, according to Harps-Muhammed. That’s despite a ballooning city surplus that Harps-Muhammed argues could be used to help Griffin’s black citizens. Instead, the city spends a not-insignificant portion of its budget — between 50 and 75 percent of the $29 million it takes each year to run the city — on law enforcement. In 2020, when protests over the killing of George Floyd arrived even in small town Griffin, Mayor Doug Holberg told upset black citizens who had arrived at city hall that the money spent on police was necessary to keep people in line.
“We spend $10 million a year on law enforcement in the city of Griffin to make people behave. Imagine if people would behave,” Holberg said as the crowd began to murmur in anger.
While Holberg may have been guilty of a lack of tact in addressing his black constituents, other government officials have publicly and privately expressed racist views. In 2018, a former Griffin city commissioner used a racial epithet at a commission meeting during Confederate History Month. In response to the sole black commissioner’s objections to honoring the confederacy, former commissioner Larry Johnson tried to explain away any racist sentiment behind supporting Confederate History Month by noting he lived next to black people as a child.
"There was white trash, my family, and there was nigger town and I lived next to nigger town," Johnson said.
More recently, in 2020, former county manager Willie Wilson was accused of racist comments by a county employee who has bi-racial children. According to the employee, Wilson said his grandfather and another man “wore the hood together,” a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson, who wore a Make America Great Again hat while working, at one point asked the employee whether her daughter was “going to vote the right way.” An attorney hired by the county to assess liability over the former employee’s claims noted that Wilson’s behavior was “inappropriate” but did not “legally create a hostile working environment.”
Wilson had been county manager from 2000 to 2009, which is when he left government to work for Johnson’s company. He returned as county manager in 2011. By 2015, Johnson’s company had secured the sole IT contract for the county.
Then there is James Dutton, the county commissioner who has posted photos of ballot envelopes taken from a dumpster on election night 2020 and who was involved in Republican efforts to take over elections in Spalding County. Dutton is a notorious loudmouth around Griffin. A defense attorney who works for a law firm his mother purchased from its previous owner, Dutton styles himself as a free-thinking Libertarian. That may be the case, but he’s also a pillar of the local Republican power structure and friend of Johnson. (This is obvious from the pair’s near-constant interactions on Facebook. Still, Dutton lied to me in our lone conversation, saying he had only vaguely heard of Johnson.) In 2021, it was Dutton who ensured that Spalding County was the only one of Georgia’s 159 counties to not issue a proclamation on Juneteenth.
Dutton objected to the proclamation, which acknowledged “the extremely painful history and lasting, systemic impact of slavery and racial injustice in the United States.” Dutton simply could not get over the word “systemic.”
Knowing all this, maybe it’s not so surprising that Ben Johnson’s beliefs haven’t ostracized him from the community. Because from the outside, Griffin looks like a lawless place, where bad actors can carry on without repercussions.
“There’s a lot of home cooking going on here. And that’s because there’s no consequences,” Isaac Melton, a longtime Griffin resident, told me in April.
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Like many places in rural America, Griffin and Spalding County are run by Republicans. Many of the people accused of wrongdoing in Griffin and Spalding — in law enforcement, in government, on the election board — are not only Republicans but government officials. They live in the hypocrisy of espousing that the government should be as small as possible while simultaneously making the government to their liking. They hold the power, they have the money, and to a large extent control what life is like in these places. Yet despite their power, they claim that power is being taken away from them, that they’re actually the ones being oppressed. To hold on to their power, they have to convince the average citizen that they, too, are also being oppressed. Republicans have been incredibly successful at this in the last 40 years, convincing working class Americans to vote against their own interests in favor of the corporate elite who actually run the party. The GOP has pulled off this incredible bamboozle by distracting its white working class base with culture war outrage. While the party works to secure tax breaks for the extremely wealthy and corporations that outsource American jobs, it has convinced the people who lost those very jobs that what they should really be worried about are the culture war distractions that flood right-wing media every day. In the aftermath of September 11, this meant the threat of Islamic terrorism. Since then, Republicans have shifted focus to what they have deemed the enemies at home.
Instead of being worried about how Republican elected officials are using their positions to help out the wealthiest Americans, the party’s base has been deftly distracted into believing non-existent threats to the Judeo-Christian values they’re told are at the heart of American life. Why worry about something as complex as tax policy that might further enrich the wealthy when you can instead get riled up about men supposedly playing women’s sports?
The other part of this genius deception that Republicans have carried out on their own voters is convincing them that anyone who brings this up is a threat not just to the powerful people in the party, but to the average voter. The most glaring recent example of this is Donald Trump making the absurd argument that, because he refused to hand over confidential government documents, the government will come for the average, conservative American next. If they’re doing this to me, a former president, Trump has said, imagine what they’ll do to you. Committed Trump acolyte that he is, Johnson has smartly absorbed this tactic. When the local newspaper ran a story last week highlighting the local NAACP’s questions about the county contracts that Johnson’s company, Liberty Technology, holds, Johnson claimed that “people are trying to cancel me.” “How does that make you feel?” he asked. Of course, the average person will never own a company that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the very government that they themselves work for. But Johnson is clever enough to understand that this doesn’t really matter. What matters is convincing people that they could be in his privileged position, and how would they like it if people were trying to take that away from them?
Obviously, in many ways Johnson is far from average. Not only does he run a successful company with dozens of employees, he is also extremely well-connected to the local Republican power structure. In fact, his company has its contract with the Spalding County government because of his connections to this structure. Former county manager Wilson’s only time away from government in the past 22 years was spent working for Johnson’s company. When he returned to government, Liberty secured its contract with the county. While Johnson spends his days online railing against liberal elites, he will never publicly admit how elite he is within his own community. To do so would expose himself as a member of the very conspiracies he espouses.
The cure for the sickness infecting America one Ben Johnson at a time is most certainly sunlight. By spending a year investigating all things Spalding County, many people outside of Griffin are now aware of what’s happening there. But nothing I or any other journalist report will change the minds of people like Johnson. Unfortunately, all of my reporting has only served to strengthen his and others’ convictions that they are fighting on the righteous side of a historic battle for the soul of America. And that’s what makes this sickness so devastating: the very people who are infected with it believe they are the cure.
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P.S. Thank you all for reading. It’s been a crazy year of reporting on election denial here in Georgia, something I definitely didn’t think would become the focus of my work when the calendar flipped to 2022. But I’m glad I did — and even more glad it’s behind me. That being said, this issue obviously isn’t going away any time soon so it’s something I’m going to stay on top of. But now, I’m taking off for a few weeks to finally have my wedding and honeymoon in Mexico. I can’t wait to see all my family and friends in a place I love so much. See you on the other side.