So, What Was the Guy Behind 2020 “Stolen Election” Theories in Georgia Up to With Guests in His Bathroom?

Where do allegations of election fraud originate? The answer can usually be narrowed down to “a message board” or “a right-wing website,” to be sure, but where do their claims come from? Who eases into consciousness in the slanting rays of the morning sun, or perhaps the early afternoon shadow of numerous empty cans of light beer, and says to him- or herself, on this day, in these vast and beautiful United States, I am going to allocate a meaningful portion of the seconds and minutes remaining in my one wild and precious life toward stating on the internet, as if I know it to be true with epistemological certainty, that Joe Biden is the president of America because the Chinese and Italian governments used compromised thermostats and satellite beams to strategically gain control of our voting machines?

Who does that? What kind of person are we dealing with who does that? What’s the deal with that?

Thanks to online anonymity, the answer is usually unclear, but because of a lawsuit filed by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss—who were falsely accused, on the basis of specious video “evidence,” of manipulating data at a Fulton County, Georgia, ballot-counting center in 2020—we may have part of the answer, as it pertains to their situation. And that answer, according to a filing in the lawsuit, is: A guy who was convicted of voyeurism and ordered to pay a massive sum of money because he videotaped people using his bathroom in Florida.

This development was noted by the Guardian, which explains that some of the allegations against Freeman and Moss were printed by the Gateway Pundit, a site notorious even by right-wing standards for publishing outlandish claims. Moss and Freeman’s attorneys are suing the Gateway Pundit, and their filing seeks to compel the site to turn over communications related to some of the “sources” for its stories. One of these sources was a man named Kevin Moncla, and Freeman and Moss allege on the basis of other documents that concerns about Moncla’s reliability were raised internally by a Gateway Pundit lawyer named John Burns. According to the filing, Burns called Moncla “a goddamned fraud” and “a known fabricator” and said he “wouldn’t touch/publish anything he produces.” (Moncla says he stands behind his work.)

Moncla, who is active in right-wing “election integrity” work in Texas, is a former resident of Destin, Florida—where, according to reporting by the Associated Press and the Ledger newspaper, he was convicted of a misdemeanor charge of voyeurism in 2004. During a subsequent lawsuit against him, a police officer testified in a deposition that he had wired a bathroom used by his houseguests for video recording; a jury ordered him to pay the guests $3.25 million. (In a February 2024 conversation with Talking Points Memo, Moncla “dismissed the voyeurism charges as an issue that came up in a ‘personal divorce case’ ” and said his work should be judged on its own merits.)

So that’s that. As to why Kevin Moncla would make things up about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, or videotape his houseguests in the bathroom, the poets can only continue to speculate.