A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022“Angela, speak!” people shout-
ed when Favorito finished.
“No, no, just thank you for
coming out,” she said, and as
people began heading home, she
was already envisioning what she
was going to do next.
She had ordered three huge
tents she was planning to raise in
her yard, imagining larger rallies
with candidates and nationally
known speakers, a gathering
place for people in the movement.
“It’ll be a safe space,” she said.
“People can come and express
themselves without worrying
someone’s going to call them
crazy.”She ordered plywood. She cut
down trees. She began level-
ing her yard.
“Always something else to do,”
she said.
She bought recording equip-
ment and broadcast the first epi-
sode of “The Dirty Peach,” featur-
ing 25 minutes of “political piggy”
awards and an anonymous wom-
an who called herself “Election
Board Throat” and claimed to
have new evidence that local
officials helped rig the 2020 elec-
tion.
“What I want is for people to
wake up,” Rubino said, and so, on
another day, she and her friend
Melissa Smith loaded up her car
with campaign signs and headed
out into the district.“Did you hear about Kemp?”
Smith said as they pulled onto a
two-lane, referring to Republican
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s sup-
port of an electric-car factory that
the governor’s rivals were casting
as a “George Soros owned woke
corporation.”
“Yeah,” said Rubino. “But this
s--- has been going on forever; it’s
just that now it’s being revealed.
It’s our fault. We gave them too
much power.”
“It’s like they’re all in it togeth-
er,” said Smith. “It’s like they hate
us all the same.”
It was a sunny day, and as they
drove through a landscape of
fresh green fields and wildflow-
ers, they talked about all the ways
they felt hated by Americans who
weren’t them.
Rubino felt hated for “thinking
for myself.” Smith felt hated for
“going against the narrative.”
Greene was always saying it at
her rallies: “They hate me. And
they hate you.”
They reached the next town,
pulling over at a busy intersec-
tion of fast-food restaurants, pay-
day lenders and run-down gas
stations, where they pounded
signs into a grass median: one for
an attorney general candidate
pledging to prosecute officials
who upheld the 2020 election,
and one for a candidate trying to
unseat a state senator who af-
firmed Biden’s victory.“Get the f--- out,” Rubino said
now, stomping her sign into the
dirt.
“They don’t want to talk about
anything we care about,” Smith
said.
They kept going, staking signs
into weedy islands strewn with
beer cans and cigarette butts,
patches of grass in front of old
strip malls and a triangle of dirt
by a gun and pawn shop.
“I don’t want all these billions
going to Ukraine when people are
hurting here,” said Smith. “I
mean, what about opioids? Every-
one around here knows some-
body dealing with it.”
“They should just let Russia
handle Ukraine — they’re ruled
by Biden’s family anyway,” said
Rubino. “They’re all just making
money off it.”
They pulled into a parking lot
to meet up with another volun-
teer working for Greene.
“Do y’all have any Witt signs?”
the volunteer said.
“Who’s he?” Rubino said.
“Fellow patriot,” the volunteer
said, referring to a Trump-en-
dorsed candidate for state insur-
ance commissioner.
“Great,” said Rubino, taking
some signs, and soon, they were
heading to another part of the
district to meet a first-time candi-
date they both knew.
They passed more rolling
farms and cattle and billboards
about Jesus, discussing elites
they’d read about on social media
who seemed to them ever-more
strange and remote from the life
they knew. The billionaire Elon
Musk and his brain chip company
Neuralink. “Can you please stop
trying to chip me?” Smith said.
The billionaire Bill Gates and his
world vaccination campaigns.
The Hollywood actors with their
esoteric habits.
“What about Lady Gaga?” Ru-
bino said.
“She does that Marina Abram-
ovic s---,” said Smith, referring to
an avant-garde performance art-
ist she’d read about. “She talked
about being naked in the woods
and Marina helped open her
mind. That’s some weird s---.”
“And who were those people
drinking each other’s blood?”
said Rubino.
“Megan Fox and her boy-
friend,” said Smith, referring to
the actor.
“Did you ever see that clip
about Hillary Clinton where shepatriot. It was late. There were
rips in the bags, so she trans-
ferred the shreds to two other
bags and stored them in her
garage, dreading what she might
find inside. “Who knows?” she
said, believing anything was pos-
sible. “Who knows?” A few days
later, she braced herself, opened
one of the bags and pulled out a
fragment of paper.
“In jail,” it read.
She pulled out another one.
“Warrant division,” it read.
She pulled out another.
“May 2021.”
“Traffic.”
“Possession of cocaine.”
She rummaged around and
found phone numbers. Partial
addresses. Names. She realized
she was going to need a large
table. Lots of tape. It was going to
take a whole team of people to
put the pieces back together, and
more time than she had to spare
at that moment. She had Republi-
can Party meetings to attend
where she was calling out “RI-
NOs” — Republicans in name
only. School issues to address
such as removing library books
that were allegedly pornographic.
Georgia’s primary elections were
coming up, and she had candi-
dates she was trying to help. She
closed the bag and stored it away
in a corner of the garage next to
her son’s soccer goal for later
scrutiny. There was so much else
to get done.S
ix years into the grass-roots
movement unleashed by
Donald Trump in his first
presidential campaign, Angela
Rubino is a case study in what
that movement is becoming. Sus-
picious of almost everything,
trusting of almost nothing, be-
lieving in almost no one other
than those who share her unease,
she has in many ways become a
citizen of a parallel America —
not just red America, but another
America entirely, one she believes
to be awash in domestic enemies,
stolen elections, immigrant in-
vaders, sexual predators, the
machinations of a global elite and
other fresh nightmares revealed
by the minute on her social media
scrolls. She is known online as
“Burnitdown.”
She is also among the people
across the country willing to do
whatever they can to ensure that
the imagined enemies of the
United States are defeated in the
2022 midterm elections and be-
yond. From school boards to state
houses to Congress, their goal is
to take political territory, and for
evidence that this is possible,
they look to northwest Georgia
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
whose first-time candidacy two
years ago defined the fringe of the
Republican Party and who is now
running for reelection as one of
its standard bearers.
“The representative of the 14th
Congressional District of Ameri-
ca” is how one local Republican
has described Greene, whose dis-
trict is mostly White, mostly rural
and has been long abandoned by
national Democrats.
“The smartest district in the
U.S.A.” is how Greene has de-
scribed her followers.
Those followers include Rubi-
no, a married 40-year-old mother
of two, a New York transplant
who had worked in restaurants
and flipped houses for a living
and once believed politics was
only for the powerful.
In Greene, she did not see what
much of America saw — a person
willing to do almost anything to
keep emotions running high,
whether that meant perpetuating
lies about election fraud, harass-
ing a victim of a school shooting,
speaking at a white nationalist
conference or casting fellow citi-
zens who disagree with her as
“domestic terrorists.”
Instead, Rubino saw a person
like herself: a political outsider
who shared the same sense of
urgency about the same dystopi-
an America, one that required a
popular uprising to save it. To
that end, Rubino had so far man-
aged to rally enough people to get
the county election board ousted,
replacing its members with those
who believed that the 2020 elec-
tion was stolen. She was part of a
group called the Domestically
Terrorized Moms that was press-
ing the local school board to get
rid of a curriculum they believedCONSPIRACIST FROM A1 to be grooming children for sex-
ual predators.
Now, on a cool Saturday morn-
ing a few weeks after she had
climbed into the dumpster, she
was getting ready to host a gath-
ering of fellow activists to strate-
gize about their next moves. In
her front yard, she pounded in
two red signs for Greene along
with a homemade sign announc-
ing her own initiative.
“Canvas your vote here,” it
read, under a red, white and blue
circle with the letters W-A-R.
“Come on in!” Rubino yelled as
people pulled into her driveway.
“Right down here!”
She set out coffee and dough-
nuts in the bed of a pickup. She
hooked up a loudspeaker she’d
bought for the occasion. She built
a roaring bonfire, and now smoke
and Aerosmith were drifting into
the blue spring sky.
“Yes, we’ll be here!” she yelled
into her cellphone. “Come on
out!”
She looked around at the peo-
ple warming their hands over the
fire, ready for action.
There was a military contrac-
tor who said he’d been reading a
Russian book about CIA-spon-
sored regime change operations,
which he believed included the
last U.S. presidential election.
There were women who believed
public schools were indoctrinat-
ing children with left-wing ideol-
ogy. Retirees who believed the
coronavirus was a bioweapon. A
mechanic who wore ear buds all
day streaming “War Room,” a
podcast in which former Trump
strategist Stephen K. Bannon was
urging people to take over local
Republican parties.
Rubino’s closest collaborator, a
woman known online as “TheBa-
seIsBack,” was also there, setting
out a display of custom gun
components engraved with
“Trump” and the American flag.
Now, as people gathered around,
she and Rubino began outlining
their plans for the coming
months, including an online plat-
form they were building where
people could record how they
voted after casting their official
ballots, starting with the Novem-
ber midterms. They had already
acquired and uploaded to the
platform the voter registration
rolls for the entire state of Geor-
gia, envisioning that millions of
people would eventually learn to
cast their votes on the system,
which would generate a tally that
could be compared to the state’s
official results, and if necessary,
challenge them.
They were also planning to
start a podcast called “The Dirty
Peach” to expose “RINOs” and
“criminal politicians.” And, to
keep people motivated, they were
launching an elaborate online
game in which players would
earn points by carrying out politi-
cal actions in real life, the more
audacious the better, such as
Rubino’s dumpster dive.
“Angela’s a legend,” someone
said at the mention of that, and
Rubino rolled her eyes.
“Everybody’s waiting for a
white horse to come and save us
from the chaos,” Rubino said.
“But no white horse is coming.”
Rubino’s friend opened her
laptop.
“Okay,” she said. “Who wants to
practice canvassing their vote?”
People started lining up to
record how they’d voted in the
2020 election, while Rubino
sloshed some lighter fluid into
the bonfire and checked her
phone. The guest speaker was on
the way. She counted heads again
— 22 now — but she wanted
more, so she grabbed a couple of
people and walked up to the
four-lane road in front of her
house.
“C’mon! C’mon!’ she yelled,
waving her arms at an SUV.
“C’mon people!” she yelled at
another car.
“Turn in, turn in !” she yelled,
and soon, a mint-green Mer-
cedes-Benz turned in, delivering
the guest speaker, a retired IT
specialist named Garland Favori-
to, who’d been traveling the state
trying to sustain interest in the
false narrative of election fraud.
“This is just the first one,”
Rubino said, explaining her plans
as Favorito shook hands, and
then he began giving a speech
about drop boxes and QR codes
and all the minutiae that filled
the social media channels Rubino
followed.In Ga., a portent ofthe evolution of theTrump movementPHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP AND ABOVE: At
home in Rome, Ga.,
Angela Rubino looks at
shredded paper that she
took from a dumpster
behind the county
election office in Rome
in hopes of finding
evidence of electoral
fraud. Rubino is a
supporter of former
president Donald Trump
and his assertion that he
lost the 2020
presidential election to
Joe Biden only because
of extensive fraud in
certain states including
Georgia.BELOW: Jessica Lyon,
left, Benny Rubino and
his mother, Angela
Rubino, wave at
motorists outside Angela
Rubino’s Georgia home
ahead of a political
meeting there.