The story is the reward
Election deniers are still at work around Georgia, despite my and many other's best efforts. So the work must go on.
“There is no end, just another beginning.” This is what a friend told me last week as I bemoaned that I didn’t want to write about or report on election matters in Georgia anymore. He wasn’t trying to be prophetic; he was trying to be supportive. I had done everything that I could, I said to him about my efforts last year to expose election deniers across the state here. Those efforts began in December 2021 and culminated in my November story for Rolling Stone about just how these cranks took over elections in Spalding County. And yet, those election deniers are not only still in power, but they’re still messing around with elections on the basis of unhinged conspiracy theories.
Dealing with these people for even a little bit is enough to make you feel a little crazy. Knowing what they’re up to on a weekly basis and constantly reporting on them for an entire year took a bit more than enough out of me. Plus there was the matter of me getting sober in the midst of all the reporting madness, a not-insignificant achievement that I’m still adjusting to. I’m also beginning to understand the relationship between my drinking and my work, which for my entire career was as close as any writer’s love affair with alcohol.
So, walking steadily into 2023, I had the idea that I would give up the election stuff. I even briefly flirted with the idea of not really doing any journalism at all and instead focus on the book I’ve been trying to sell for the past few years. I’m lucky to have steady work for private clients that allows me to flex my journalism muscles through various forms of investigations, and that’s what actually pays the bills. Journalism has been little more than an expensive hobby for a while now.
But my malaise wasn’t simply based on last year’s election denier investigation — and more to the point the lack of any concrete results from it. Quitting drinking opened up entire sections of my mind that had been ignored or shouted down for years. I realized, after more than 10 years in journalism, that I was burnt out from all the stories, not just the most recent one. Before you start thinking, oh God, here’s another woe-is-me reporter who wants people to feel sorry for him because of all the trauma he’s taken in — and I would understand that thought, because I’ve had it many times — this is not about me. I don’t care about me. I care about results. And for a decade now I haven’t seen many.
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I entered 2023 with the clearest mind I’ve had in decades and couldn’t help but wonder what all this work was for. For 10 years I have gotten up each day and, in some small way, exposed wrongdoing. You’d think after all that — after all those stories — you’d see some change in the world. But instead, I’ve seen the world getting worse. There are so many scandals on any given day, so much online noise, so much content, so much TV, movies, art, music — everything — that it seems impossible for any one thing to rise to the level of importance that motivates people to do something about it.
I know people are doing something about it. I know good people across the country got involved when they saw election deniers and other far-right extremists trying to secure power in the wake of the 2020 election. In the midterms, they mostly stopped this extremist takeover from happening. That’s a good thing. But at times it just seems like all the bad I’ve seen isn’t outweighed by the good. It seems like the bad guys keep winning no matter how hard I and many others play the game. And then, of course, it all seems like a game — like we’re all just players in something that is far beyond our control. I feel like I could sub in at any given moment and find the exact thing I did when I first started in journalism — corrupt politicians, bad cops, greedy rich people screwing over desperate poor people. I feel like I’m telling the same story over and over again, just with different names and in different places. It all seems so fruitless at times. For those wondering just what the hell I’m talking about — and I understand if that’s the case, because I’ve increasingly felt a little bit off my rocker lately anyway — here’s a few examples.
I covered police shootings for years, trying to figure out which ones were justified and which ones weren’t. Now, we have more than ever before — more than 1,000 a year — and we’re no closer to knowing how many are justified. We don’t know this because we don’t have body camera footage for every single one of those shootings. And we don’t have that because it’s a pain in the ass to get it. Trust me; I’ve tried. Even if body cam footage exists, it can take weeks, months, and — in most cases, in my experience — years to get that footage. A few years back I asked the Dallas Police Department for all footage of police shootings over a five year period. Almost four years later, they provided the footage in a completely disorganized dump with thousands and thousands of files and videos, most of them completely useless for the purposes of determining whether a shooting was justified or not. Hell, I had an incredibly difficult time digging through the haystack and even identifying which fatal police shooting a certain video was from. Similar efforts have gone just as badly. For a client a few years ago, I went after body cam footage of fatal police shootings in Baltimore. The law enforcement agency said it could give them to me — if I paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars so they could do things like blur the faces of witnesses in the videos. So, I’m sorry if you’re one of those people who believes the right-wing noise about the Thin Blue Line and cops being under attack. In my experience, police are just as brazen as ever about shooting people for little to no reason, and when a reporter comes asking for the video that shows these shootings, law enforcement agencies are often just as terrible as they’ve always been in releasing the evidence.
After roaming the country for a few years covering police violence and other random acts of American brutality, I settled down in Texas, where I covered immigration. I witnessed the desperation of migrants who wanted the most basic thing — safety and security for them and their families — and watched as entitled politicians who never had to struggle for anything called these migrants nothing short of dirty criminals and rapists. I heard these same politicians call for a stupid wall that would do nothing to address the root causes of migration — climate change, extreme poverty, America’s bottomless appetite for drugs. Now, I turn on the TV and hear them say the same thing every few months when trashing migrants becomes a politically expedient move in the news cycle. Every pink-faced politician who says he’s earned it simply because he was lucky enough to be born in America should have to work on a farm in the mountains of Guatemala for a few months and see if he doesn’t learn the desperation that it takes to ride the Beast or traverse the Darien Gap in search of a better life. I bet they’d all get desperate enough to become “illegal” immigrants themselves; but I also bet a lot of these would-be tough guys wouldn’t make it.
But all of that was relatively clean compared to politics. I won’t bore you with Chris Collins, who I’ve written about many times and don’t ever want to write about again. He’s a typical case: smug, entitled, one of these “self-made” businessmen who has no sense of self and has not created much other than wealth and power for himself. He’s also typical in that he got away with it completely clean and is probably making more in a year as a lobbyist than I will in a decade investigating people like him. Politics is dirt. Politics is shameful. Politics is what a lot of people who were the only ones in their class who thought they were interesting end up doing for a living. At the local level, it’s also even more rife with corruption, cronyism and outright criminality than you can imagine. Finally — and most importantly — politics, especially local politics, is staffed by astoundingly dim people. It’s filled with people whose primary attribute and driving characteristic is that they follow the rules. And yet, they’re the same ones constantly breaking them.
These boring rule-followers are the very people I investigated for a year in Spalding County. After taking power, almost their first order of business was to try to break the rules — and the law — by letting members of an equally dull and rules-based profession access voter information: IT specialists. These are people who don’t possess the critical thinking skills or creativity required to be a gas station cashier — and I know, because that was one of my many jobs before becoming a journalist, or writer, or investigator, or whatever it is that I am now. They shouldn’t be qualified to sell cigarettes to people but they’re running elections. And this, this, is precisely why I entered 2023 steadily sober but more jaded than ever about this work. How could I not? I found a scheme dumb enough to have been the plot of a Coen Brothers movie being carried out by some of the dullest, most reactionary simpletons you could ever imagine and instead of them getting run out of town in tar and feathers, they’re still there, still messing with things they have no business messing with.
Precisely because of the fact that all these bumpkins are still in power is why my friend told me that this story isn’t over. More importantly, the work of monitoring election matters in Georgia isn’t over, at least not for me. Sunlight doesn’t stop lies and corruption but it does expose them. The reward for exposing wrongdoing isn’t always that justice is done. Sometimes, the reward is simply that you’ve exposed the wrongdoing.
***
I have this sign hanging in my office that’s part of a Hunter Thompson quote: how his stories and his life would be filled with ink and rage. I used to wholeheartedly believe in this mindset. Now, after seven months of getting sober and learning about addiction and many other things related to recovery, rage seems like a dangerous emotion for anyone trying to live a balanced and healthy life. Even righteous anger presents a danger to addicts like myself. Instead, recovery has taught me that you should approach your attempts to make the world better from a place of compassion, not anger or vengeance. I’ve certainly been guilty of vengeful thinking at times.
Looking back on all my attempts at justice through my work, it seems fitting that the one that had the most concrete results was my first major story. I spent almost a year writing about Native American homeless people when I worked at the Bemidji Pioneer in Minnesota. After the stories came out, two of the story subjects died, another (at the time) got sober, and some in the town rallied to the cause, creating the first 24-hour shelter that would let people in regardless of their level of intoxication. This was done to prevent even more deaths in the bitter winter cold. I learned that journalism could result in important change, but I was also tricked into believing that it happens all the time. Now I know that sometimes, the change comes in ways that you can’t see.
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Because of these hard-learned lessons, I’m going to continue my election work in Georgia. But it’s going to be tedious — and expensive. County agencies across the state want thousands of dollars to provide records of communications that will show what election officials are discussing behind closed doors. If you want to help pay for these records and allow me to expose more election deniers, you can donate to my Patreon here. I’ll have a newsletter out next week that details what’s been going on in Spalding County since the midterms. It’s bound to be ugly.