As many other people have mentioned before, we live in the dumbest of all time lines. A place where all sorts of screwball conspiracies pop up and no one bothers to spend the two minutes necessary to see if an accusation is true before breathlessly tweeting it out to the world. Usually accompanied by a comment along the lines of "The MSM will never report this!"

About an hour ago, I ran across a tweet from a conservative talk show guy I follow. He was retweeting someone else who claimed that a former FBI Agent and Biden staffer has been arrested. He doesn't mention the name in his tweet, but in his comments he bravely suggests that people use Google. So why not just reveal the identity of the person he claims has been arrested in the initial tweet. Well, skeptics might suspect that he wants to stir up some trouble on social media without proving he's just making stuff up:



You notice the guy has added "President-Elect" to his profile name, which you see a lot in conservative political circles. I guess it's supposed to be some sort of 3-D level trolling about how "anyone can call themselves president-elect." Although to be honest, it comes across a lot like an exceptionally lame Dad joke.

I digress, although in my defense, it's pretty easy to do with this story.

If you look up Dallas Jones in Google, you'll find a bunch of stories from late September that reference affidavits filed with the Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) that allege there had been a coordinated ballot harvesting operation in Harris County. According to the affidavits, witnesses allege Texas Sen. Boris Miles and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis were orchestrating a ballot harvesting scheme with help from Biden campaign official Dallas Jones.

Now you might be thinking "wow, these are blockbuster allegations, I wonder why I heard about these before?" For the answer to that question, let's take a look at what the fact-checking website Snopes discovered when they looked into the story:

The only evidence offered in the filing are statements made by the private investigators under oath, which don’t offer any specifics. The statement doesn’t say who the private investigators are working for. One of the investigators claims he will bring his findings to law enforcement and that they are investigating, but he doesn’t state which agency he is referring to.

It's also worth noting that the filing also asked the Texas Supreme Court to block Harris County Clerk Christopher Hollins from implementing Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order moving up the beginning of early voting to start on Oct.13 instead of Oct. 19. It also seeks to stop Hollins from allowing voters to drop off absentee ballots early.

The reason you haven't heard more about this story is that no one took the vague allegations seriously. So why did a story pop up now that claimed Dallas Jones had been arrested for election fraud?

The funniest thing about this entire idiotic story is that I could not find one mention of Dallas Jones having been arrested in Google and calls to Wayne County law enforcement as well as officials in surrounding communities didn't find any arrest records. Instead, all of these QAnon chuckleheads were pointing to this story as "proof," which turns out to be something that was posted on a French-language QAnon web site. It also has a time stamp dated four days from now, but that's another story.

Here is the story, which claims to show Dallas Jones being arrested for ballot harvesting:



I decided I would run the arrest photo through an image search engine to see what I could find. I wasn't able to right-click and save the image, since the web site had used java-script to warn me I was committing "copyright infringement." Which is pretty freaking hilarious, given that image is not Dallas Jones. Instead, it's a photo of Cuba Gooding Jr. being arrested in 2019:



The QAnon web site uses a slightly different photo than the AP one used in the Gooding story. But it's clearly from the same sequence of shots, even if the QAnon photo it so grainy it could have been taken from space.

Now if it turns out that Cuba Gooding Jr. has been arrested for ballot harvesting, then THAT would be a story.