If 1994 brought the Republican Revolution and 2010 delivered the Tea Party to D.C., the 2022 election may bring something even more extreme.
In November 2020, the Republican Derrick Van Orden narrowly lost his attempt to unseat Representative Ron Kind in Wisconsin’s Third District, falling just 10,000 votes behind the veteran Democrat out of nearly 400,000 cast.
But Van Orden insisted that voter fraud had tainted the election results. Two months later, the former Navy SEAL was in Washington, D.C., on January 6, “to stand for the integrity of our electoral system.” He later wrote that he was “disturbed” by the violence that day, and never entered the U.S. Capitol grounds. When The Daily Beast uncovered photos showing that wasn’t true, Van Orden said the report was “inaccurate,” but wouldn’t say why. He also spent campaign money while in Washington, an apparent violation of federal election law.
His views on voter fraud are not the only strange things about Van Orden. Last year he entered a library in the town of Prairie du Chien and harangued a 17-year-old library staffer over a gay-pride display, leaving her feeling threatened. (He did not dispute her account.) His commitment to social conservatism only extends so far, though: In a memoir of his military service, he jocularly described tricking two unsuspecting women into looking at a comrade’s swollen genitalia. He has criticized COVID-19 containment strategies, saying that contact tracing is the same as “what the KGB...
A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where t...