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First of a two-part story.

Miranda Webb knew danger lurked when her dog started barking inside their Acapulco rental home in February 2019.

When she peeked out a window, Webb saw four teens outside a locked gate, throwing rocks toward the house.

Webbs boyfriend, Shane Cress, whom she met when they were students at Kent State University, immediately grabbed a Taser and a small handgun and headed outside to investigate.

She grabbed a machete, but before she could follow Cress and a friend down the driveway, she heard pop, pop, pop. One of the teens had opened fire.

The drug war Webb tried to leave behind in Ohio had caught up to her in Mexico.

Only this time, it wasnt Portage County law enforcement after her.

It appeared to be a Mexican drug cartel.

What happened in the years before and since is part of Webbs complicated journey to be free.

Free from the extended childhood trauma of her mothers drug dealing and addiction, which for years had the family on the run from a motorcycle club and Northeast Ohio police.

Free from mainstream society, where she never felt she fit in.

And free now, at age 29, to pursue a quiet life of crocheting, selling home-brewed kombucha and flying from a circus trapeze somewhere in Mexico.

Webb who is better known to many by her alias, Lily Forester worries less now about drug lords than being deported back to Ohio.

Shes been a fugitive since 2015 after she and Cress skipped bail on felony charges accusing them of making hash oil from marijuana at West Branch State Park near Ravenna.

Webb, who worked to reform Ohios marijuana laws when she led Kent States Students for Sensible Drug Policy, denies the allegations but could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

This is the story of Webb, her search for self-determination and what she lost and found along the way.

About the docuseries:'The Anarchists'

It is based on more than four hours of Zoom interviews with Webb in September, along with previous interviews shes given to others, news accounts, court records and the recently released HBO documentary series The Anarchists, which is partly focused on Webbs life in Mexico.

Webb was born into the drug war, she often says.

Her parents, Randal Webb and Michelle Jarvis, met because my dad liked to buy weed and my mom liked to sell weed, Webb said.

They didnt stay together. Randal Webb lived in Lake County, east of Cleveland and, until she was about 8 years old, Miranda Webb lived a tumultuous life with her mother in Lorain County, west of Cleveland.

Some of Miranda Webbs earliest memories are police officers lifting her, asleep, out of bed during overnight drug raids wherever her mom was living.

Id wake up and ask, Where am I? Webb said. Theyd tell me I was at a police station and that my mommys in jail and theyd give me a stuffed animal.

Webb also remembers her mom waking her up, saying they were going on adventure and fleeing into the night, leaving everyone they knew behind.

Webb later learned from her mothers journals that they were running from a motorcycle gang. Jarvis, she said, had been dealing opium for the bikers and owed them money.

They were coming to kill her and our family, Webb said.

Mom had two personalities, Webb said. Mom and Red, her drug-dealing name. Red was a reference to Jarvis long, naturally red hair.

Jarvis, who had five children, spent about seven years of Webbs childhood on the run.

By the time she was 8, Webb was sick, losing her teeth and diagnosed as malnourished. When Webb asked Jarvis if she could live with her dad, Jarvis considered it for a while, then crushed up a pill, snorted it and told Webb she could go.

Webbs mom got clean for a while and by 2010 had moved to Medina County, where she lived with two young sons in a house on state Route 18 between Montrose and Medina.

Just before Christmas that year, Jarvis ran out of the house and onto the busy highway during morning rush hour, saying she was being chased by demons.

Jarvis beckoned her boys to follow her. They didnt, but watched as one car hit their mother, then a second before Jarvis stumbled into the path of an oncoming semitractor trailer. The Ohio State Highway Patrol said Jarvis died later that day at Medina Hospital. She was 42.

An autopsy revealed Jarvis had morphine, oxycodone and tramadol in her system, Webb said.

I think she just gave up, Webb said.

Webb was 16 when Jarvis died and everyone started drawing parallels with her mother, comparing how they looked Webb had long, strawberry-blond hair and acted.

Webb said she loved her mother, but never intended to follow her path into addiction or hard drugs.

Kent State University, Webb thought, was her way out.

Webb paused midsentence the first time she saw Shane Cress.

It was around January 2012. They were both freshmen at Kent State, and Webb was leading a Students for Sensible Drug Policy meeting.

Nice hat, Webb told Cress, who was hiding his budding dreadlocks under a Ron Paul cap.

Webb and Cress were fans of Paul, a former U.S. congressman who ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian and as a Republican. Among other things, Paul was critical of U.S. fiscal policy, the war on drugs and, after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror.

Later in the meeting, as the students were introducing themselves, Cress said he had just been released from prison and was a victim in the drug war.

That just like hooked me, said Webb, who also considered herself a victim of the drug war.

Webb opposed any drugs that could lead to the kind of addiction that ruined her mothers life. But she initially enrolled at Kent State to study botany because she wanted to learn how to grow marijuana.

Cress, it turned out, was years ahead of her.

The first week they started dating, he took her to his off-campus rental house. Outside, there was a huge garden.

That was his cover a hippie growing vegetables, she said.

But inside, hidden in the basement, were cannabis plants growing in tents.

The plants werent doing that well, Webb said, but Cress said he could teach her how to grow.

Webb didnt know it then, but the two had something else in common: Cress dad also died a violent death in Medina County.

Steven Cress, who had a bipolar disorder, shot and killed himself in 1992 after police burst into a room while he was threatening suicide, his family said.

He died three days before Shane Cress first birthday.

By the time Shane Cress was 2 years old, he began showing some of the same behaviors as his father, his mother, Judy Hlavac, said on The Anarchists.

When he was 5, she put an alarm on Cress bedroom door after he began nighttime rages, destroying things in the house as others slept.

Cress was soon diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, like his father, and as he grew older, he turned to marijuana for comfort.

At 17, he followed a girl to Oklahoma and was arrested after a landlord discovered Cress was growing weed in a closet.

A judge told Cress he could go to prison for life or go to a boot camp and then leave Oklahoma. Cress chose the second option.

At boot camp, officials shaved his head.

Cress didnt think they had a right to do that, Hlavac said in the HBO documentary. It changed him. He started becoming very anti-government.

A couple of weeks after Webb and Cress started dating, Webb tested out the new Rollerblades her dad bought her for her birthday.

She was skating between her Kent dorm room at Olson Hall and a convenience store when she underestimated how steep a hill was.

Webb crashed outside the psychology building and broke her jaw in three places.

Doctors wired her mouth shut for six weeks, and Cress made her smoothies for a week and took care of her weed needs to manage jaw pain.

Cress believed marijuana could help many ailments. In high school, he developed a special strain to help a friend who was shot in the eye with a BB gun after prescription medicine didnt help him.

He was also teaching Webb about Libertarianism, the political idea that the state should stay out of the private market and peoples private lives.

Its not actually that radical to believe that people should be free, Cress told Kent Wired in 2012 after taking over as president of the Kent Student Liberty Alliance. At the end of the day, the government is just a big gun that we use to point at each other, and thats why most of us dont like politics. Because its just a game to control the gun.

But being free, when it came to marijuana, wasnt easy.

When Cress Kent landlord discovered marijuana growing in the basement, he gave Cress five days to move out, Webb said.

Cress and Webb moved the operation to a friends house overlooking the former tire factories in Akrons Goodyear Heights neighborhood.

In the coming months, after about 18 months of college, they both decided college wasnt for them, and they decided to live their political philosophy full time by being self-sufficient and going off grid, disconnected from running water and electricity.

In the winter of 2014, a friend hooked them up with a house on the east side of Cleveland.

Instead of overlooking old rubber factories, this house off Pershing Avenue overlooked an industrial valley of steel mills.

Many of the surrounding houses had been abandoned or torn down years ago as Cleveland shed blue-collar union jobs.

Webb and Cress spent what money they had on solar panels and a generator. They heated the house with a wood stove and gathered rainwater from the roof to cook and drink.

When spring came, they built a garden, planting seeds in moldy bales of hay a farmer didnt want.

Webb said the garden thrived, with a dozen types of tomatoes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, beans, corn and any other vegetable that would grow in Northeast Ohio.

At the same time, Cress took a job building stages at Jacobs Pavilion in The Flats to bring in extra money.

Locals thought we were crazy, Webb said.

But things were going fairly well, she said, until the house was condemned.

Webb and Cress were still committed to living off the grid, but wondered if it might be easier if they joined a larger community instead of going it alone.

In January 2015, they moved out of the Cleveland house, which has since been torn down, and made plans to move to Detroits Fireweed Universe City, where artists, anarchists and others had reclaimed a block of abandoned houses in a particularly rough section of that city near 7 Mile Road.

Webb and Cress picked a vacant house well-suited for solar panels and a garden plot and returned to Northeast Ohio a couple of weeks later to pack up the rest of their stuff at a relatives house in Portage County.

Whoa, look who we have here, a Portage County sheriffs deputy said when he saw Webb and Cress at West Branch State Park near Ravenna in the summer of 2015, Webb said.

Webb said she recognized the deputy from their Students of Sensible Drug Policy meetings in Kent, where he was apparently working under cover.

No one trusted him, Webb said, because he always said he was trying to launch a similar student group at the University of Akron, but it never materialized. The Portage County Drug Task Force did not respond to messages.

Webb explained to him and two other officers that she and Cross were on their way back to Fireweed in Detroit when they stopped at an empty house at the park to let out their dog.

Webb thinks she might have escaped with a ticket for trespassing that day ifCress wasnt so cocky, filming everything, including the search of her car.

My car was like the Mary Poppins of weed, Webb said. But instead of a bag, it was a car and they just kept pulling out thing after thing. My bongs and my pipes and a case of butane and some weed that had already been blown, meaning the marijuana had already been drained of its THC.

Webb said she tried to persuade officers to let them go on their way, explaining that they were headed back to Fireweed where they intended to form a legal marijuana business under Michigan state law.

But deputies said the couple was using butane to manufacturing hash oil, a concentrated form of marijuana often referred to as dabs.

They held Webb and Cress in the Portage County Jail, and a grand jury in August 2015 indicted each of them on several felony charges, including the illegal manufacturing of drugs and trafficking in marijuana.

Cress family bailed them out and tried to persuade them to stay.

But Webb and Cress decided to run.

They first headed back to Fireweed, where they knew they could find work. When that ended, a relative convinced them to head to Oregon, where she said they could make a few thousand dollars doing trim work during the marijuana harvest.

They thought that would be enough to pay their way into Mexico, where they hoped theyd be safe from Portage County authorities.

Webb and Cress found a ride-sharing service to Oregon on Craigs List.

They arrived in Oregon just before Halloween 2015 and discovered it was the end of the cannabis growing season.

Webb and Cress found a little work, but were paid in weed, not cash, which had little worth in an area saturated with marijuana, Webb said.

Many people there went by aliases, and thats where Webb was reborn Lily Forester. Cress was already calling himself John Galt, the name of a character in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, and a hero for many Libertarians.

Some of Cress family sent them $700 to help, and they used it to buy an old, canary-yellow pickup truck and started making their way toward Mexico, panhandling for gas money along the way.

See the rest here:
Miranda Webb: Trauma, anarchy and perilous life on the run from Northeast Ohio to Mexico - Akron Beacon Journal

FREEBURG Wood River running back Seth Slayden doesn't want to remember the first quarter from Friday's Cahokia Conference Mississippi Division football game against Freeburg.

Slayden's coach agreed though he did point out a pretty major silver lining.

"That first quarter is one I'd like to forget, defensively and offensively," Wood River coach Garry Herron said. "We did the same thing at Breese Central (earlier this season). We didn't show up for a half there. This time at least we showed up in the second quarter."

The next three quarters were much better for the Oilers.

Wood River, behind the strong running from Slayden and some key turnovers, punched its ticket into Illinois high school football playoffs with a 36-30 victory.

"We're working our butts off during the week to get the wins out here," Slayden said. "We struggled in the past, but we're here and we're ready."

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Wood River (6-1 overall, 3-1 Cahokia Mississippi) earned an automatic bid to the playoffs with its sixth win.

It's the first time the Oilers have been playoff eligible since 2018.

"It's something we've been working towards since the last time we were in the playoffs," Herron said. "This group clicked and has worked really hard. There's a reason why they're here. It's just an awesome feeling."

It's the first win for Wood River over Freeburg in its last five tries.

Slayden helped lead the way by carrying the ball 28 times for a career-high 256 yards and two touchdowns.

"He has great vision and follows his blockers," Herron said. "He's everything you want in a back. He has a lot of fight in him."

Slayden had two long carries for 30 or more yards, and the last one all but sealed the game a 52-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter.

"Every long run I'm free, I think someone's right on my tail," Slayden said. "You're hoping that you can speed it up and get to the end zone."

As good as Slayden was picking his way through traffic, he was the first one to give thanks to the big line up front for opening up holes all night long.

"They're right there by my side. The line makes it for us," Slayden.

Slayden is just the fifth runner in the area to break the 1,000-yard barrier this season.

Early on, Freeburg (3-4, 0-4 Cahokia) had Wood River's offense contained.

The Oilers got a little tricky to break free.

In the first quarter, Slayden took a handoff on a fourth-down play and drifted to his right before firing a pass to a wide-open Jakob Gerber in the back of the end zone to get the Oilers on the scoreboard.

That was just the second pass completion ever for the senior and the first touchdown pass of his career.

"We tried in a few games, but it wasn't successful until tonight," Slayden said. "It just happened to work out, but we needed to score that drive."

After averaging 10 points a game the last three weeks, Freeburg's offense found some room to work against Wood River.

The Midgets rolled up nearly 400 yards of offense with senior quarterback AJ Banks going 21 for 30 for 284 yards through the air.

"AJ made great plays all night long and our kids didn't give up," Freeburg coach Ron Stuart said.

Trailing 30-23 in the fourth quarter, Freeburg was driving with less than eight minutes left in regulation before Wood River senior Chris Fitzgerald stepped in front of a pass for an interception.

"He has a dislocated finger on one hand and is hurt on the other," Herron said. "I don't know how he caught it, but we'll take it."

It was the third turnover on the night for Freeburg.

"We turned the ball over and defensively we let up some big plays and got hit with penalties," Stuart said. "That's something we've been dealing with and in the last four weeks against good teams you have to play a perfect game to give yourself a chance to win."

It's the first time since 2017 that the Midgets have gone through a four-game losing streak, but Stuart saw a silver lining for his team with two games remaining on the season.

"Play like you did tonight and that gives us an opportunity to win the next two ball games," Stuart said. "That's the team we've been looking for the last two weeks."

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Miguel Romero (5) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Chris Fitzgerald runs back to his sideline after an interception during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Jamari Nunn (75) celebrates with his team after a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Freeburg's Cole Stuart (1) makes the catch over Wood River's Jakob Gerber (17) during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Freeburg's Tucker Murphy (43) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Freeburg's Landon Townley (82) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) dives for the pylon during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Freeburg's Tucker Murphy (43) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Freeburg's AJ Banks (9) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Brayden St. Peters (24) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Miguel Romero (5) looks over the defense during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) makes the stop on Freeburg's Caleb Loftus (27) during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

Wood River's Seth Slayden (22) runs with the ball during a football game on Friday, October 7, 2022 at Freeburg High School in Freeburg, Ill. Paul Halfacre, STLhighschoolsports.com

STLHighSchoolSports.com is the most comprehensive source of stats, scores and stories from any and all area high schools.

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Slayden carries Wood River past Freeburg and back into the playoffs - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The expected resignation of Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating 90.96%, was celebrated by a former and possibly future president who is extremely popular among conservatives.

Liddle Ben Sasse, the lightweight Senator from the great State of Nebraska was nothing but a Fake RINO, Donald Trump wrote on his social media website, and we have enough weak and ineffective RINOs in our midst.

Much of this has to do with Trump, of course. Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) were strong fiscal conservatives who got sideways with Trump and are now gone.

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But it isnt just about Trump, even if he played an outsize role in bringing all the Rights family squabbles to the forefront. Increasingly, it is not just about being a conservative. What kind of conservative you are is at least as important.

Sasse and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have nearly identical voting records. They have different stylistic and substantive approaches to conservatism, which cause them to have radically different fanbases.

The distinctions between them may matter little to your average Republican voter, but they attract different staffers and admirers in the pundit class. There is little overlap between people who fantasize about Sasse becoming president of the United States rather than the University of Florida and those who pine for Hawley in 2024.

While this manifests itself most prominently in controversies such as certifying President Joe Bidens election or impeaching Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Sasse and Hawley dont see eye-to-eye on trade, immigration, foreign policy, and Big Tech. They have somewhat different views on the applicability of Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party of today.

Libertarians and neoconservatives, nationalists and old-school Reaganites these factions have little use for each other. They often devote at least as much time to attacking one another as liberals or Democrats. When some conservatives denounce liberalism in 2022, they mean John Locke rather than John Dewey, George Will as much as George McGovern.

Conservatives are turning against each other in part because they have won the battle for control of the Republican Party. The centrists are routed, and liberals in the mold of Jacob Javits, the four-term GOP senator from New York, are as extinct as the Federalists or the Whigs.

As late as 2006, Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 35.95%, could win a Republican primary against a conservative challenger. He is now in at least his fourth partisan configuration since that election. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) beat his eventual successor, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), in a Republican primary in 2004 despite a 41.86% lifetime ACU rating. Specter died a Democrat.

Moderate Republicanism is now an almost entirely blue-state phenomenon, a safety valve for Democratic excess in places that otherwise would lack a meaningful two-party system. Its adherents can get elected governor or become Cabinet secretaries (in a Democratic administration as much as a Republican one), but their aspirations end there.

Even the surviving examples of this species have adapted to a changing habitat, with many of them resembling Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) without the post-Massachusetts fallback option of a Utah Senate seat, privately more conservative than they can ever admit to their constituents. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote in Reagan for president in 2020, not Nelson Rockefeller.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is arguably the most conservative lawmaker to lead Republicans in that chamber since Robert Taft. He has been savaged by the populist Right as a "Republican in name only" sell-out from the Tea Party to MAGA. Libertarians view him with suspicion despite his burying the hatchet with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). And McConnell may be the last member of the dreaded GOP establishment with any real power left.

In the Reagan years, conservatives wanted small government and tight communities, traditional values and unfettered markets, the mom-and-pop shop (and families were led by mom and pop, terms with clear definitions) to lie down with the Wall Street bank.

The fusionist promise was like the feminist one: You can have it all. Some conservatives, and some women, now fear those promises ring hollow. So if forced to choose, in the Milton Friedman rather than Margaret Sanger sense, what should conservatives prioritize?

Attitude is an important part of this story too. Attend a gathering of national conservatives and ask yourself what unites such disparate elements as right-wing industrial policy proponents, Koch network alumni, reformed neoconservatives and unreconstructed paleoconservatives, Catholic integralists, and Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony. The answer: the view that the Right has been playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and needs to fight on the Lefts terms, even if that means wielding government power when conservatives possess it.

Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the most recent National Conservatism Conference, understand this. Sasse is no shrinking violet. He accused a president of his own party of kissing dictators butts and questioned whether Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had balls.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

But the MAGA style isnt his. It ultimately turned out not to be former Vice President Mike Pences.

Biden likes to say that this isnt your fathers Republican Party. For once, hes right.

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Ben Sasse and the battle over what kind of conservative leads the GOP - Washington Examiner

Andrea Stetson| Correspondent

They are being called the heroes of Tonya Court and Wisconsin Street. As water rushed down their streets and into homes during Hurricane Ian, three men on paddleboards and a personal watercraft rescued more than a dozen people along with dogs, cats, rabbits and even a horse.

They say they dont feel like heroes, yet with downed power lines, they took big risks to paddle through the water knocking on doors and windows where they found people standing on countertops and tables to avoid the rapidly rising water.

I felt like it was something I had to do, Sammy Sosa said. I could not sit there knowing people could possibly drown.

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Sosa and his neighbor, Scott Sopher, grabbed two yellow and white paddleboards from a neighbors yard and began the quest of helping people. A block away Jules De Ron hopped on his personal watercraft to help.

It felt good that we were helping people, Sopher said. I didnt feel like a hero. I just did it.

Sosa said in some places the water was up to his neck and the winds were blowing at about 100 miles per hour. He had to paddle around fallen trees and falling tree limbs.

There was no emergency response and no one else was crazy enough to go out there, Sosa said. I just kept going until I got to every single house. I kept going from house to house banging on every door and window. If there was someone in there, I got them out.

At one house Sopher and Sosa had to make several trips to rescue two people, two dogs, two cats and a rabbit. Sosa paddled down to a barn at the very end of Wisconsin Street to open the doors and rescue a horse.

I was holding on to the horses neck and trying to get the barn door open, Sosa described. When we got him out, we walked him to the fire department.

The people that were rescued were taken to homes on dry land further down on Wisconsin Street.

The water came up so fast, Sopher said. We knew people were stuck in their houses so we grabbed the paddleboards and went. It was one of the craziest things Ive seen.

Paul Byrne stood on his kitchen table on Tonya Court as the water rose. When the water got higher than the four-foot-tall table, he put a milk crate on top of that and stood there. Byrne says he does not know how to swim, so it was scary.

The water came in very quickly, Byrne described. I had spent quite a bit of time getting my precious documents high and by the time that was done it was too high to get out. It was just all a big lake.

From his perch on the crate, Byrne saw the men with the paddleboards rescue his neighbors on both sides, before coming to his house.

Im not much of a swimmer, so he paddled in and took me on the board to the high house, Bryne said. I was elated.

Deanna and Jeff Martin were on their kitchen counter next door when the men came to rescue them.

The power lines came down in the backyard and there were sparks, Deanna Martin described. We wanted to keep out of the water because of all the sparks. When the power went off, we swam out.

Martin said they put some of their personal items on the paddleboard and hung on as they were towed to safety.

I swam to the other side of the driveway and then grabbed onto the surfboard and got out of here, Jeff Martin described.

Jules De Ron met Sosa and Sopher and teamed up to help pull the victims to safety. De Ron began his quest by simply helping one neighbor.

Once we were out there, I went to see if anybody else needed help, he said. It was nothing special. I was just out there.

See the rest here:
'The water came up so fast': The heroes of Tonya Court and Wisconsin Street - Naples Daily News

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"We know what happened in 2020," said state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a Republican from Menomonee Falls.

"Powerful and rich forces are aligned against me," said Michael Gableman, a former state Supreme Court Justice.

"Was it rigged? Was it fixed? I'm going to stop it!" said Tim Michels, the 2022 Republican nominee for governor.

Republicans in Wisconsin have been amplifying Donald Trump's debunked election conspiracy theories for nearly two years.

Rachel Rodriguez has heard them all.

"There is absolutely no glamor in elections," said Rodriguez, an elections specialist in the Dane County Clerk's Office. "Every time you think you have put one conspiracy theory to bed, it seems like another different one just pops up in its place."

An elections specialist in the Dane County Clerk's Office, Rachel Rodriguez describes the difficulty of responding to an ongoing stream of misinformation and conspiracy theories about voting in Wisconsin in an interview on Aug. 24, 2022. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

She knows every step of the process, so when Republicans in the Legislature started holding invitation-only hearings to give an official platform to election conspiracy theorists, she followed them closely.

"It was readily apparent that within minutes that the experts that they were trotting out had absolutely no expertise in actual elections," said Rodriguez.

She started fact-checking the hearings over Twitter.

Soon, Rodriguez was being retweeted by the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and gained an audience looking for the truth.

"I think people were really looking for that other side of it the actual expert side because that wasn't happening at the hearings," she said.

Republicans hired the former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to lead an investigation on the 2020 election, but what he produced was open records violations, a contempt of court order and a million-dollar bill for taxpayers.

Michael Gableman, the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who was hired by the Republican-controlled state Legislature to probe the 2020 election, declares he won't answer any questions while seated in a witness box during a June 10, 2022 hearing in Dane County Court over an open records lawsuit. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

Gableman was fired after endorsing the primary opponent of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the man who hired him.

"Mike Gableman is an embarrassment to the state," said Vos.

Rodriguez said the cumulative effect was the truth around election conspiracies started to look like partisan politics.

"Where the problem is right now is that when you have one party and it is one party who is driving all of this misinformation and all of the conspiracies and all of the doubt when you take the side of actual facts and truth, which is opposite to that, it's going to look like it's one party over the other," she said.

"I'm going to get rid of the Wisconsin Elections Commission," declared Michels at an Aug. 5 rally in Waukesha where he appeared with the former president.

Michels is the Republican candidate for governor, and while he doesn't outright say the 2020 election was stolen, he does campaign with those that do. Michels even saluted Republican state Rep. Tim Ramthun, a full-on election conspiracist who wanted to somehow "reclaim" Wisconsin's 2020 electoral votes.

"I see my friend out here, ran a spirited primary Tim Ramthun was very big on election integrity as well," Michels said at a Sept. 18 rally in Green Bay with Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

At one event, Michels told a supporter in order to win, he had to overcome a cheating percentage.

Tim Michels, the Republican nominee for governor in the 2022 election, speaks at the Chicken Burn, a conservative rally held in Wauwatosa on Aug. 28, 2022. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

"What's the cheating percentage? It's probably a point or two. I think we're going to come out ahead," said Michels at the Chicken Burn, an annual conservative gathering in Wauwatosa held on Aug. 28.

Tim Michels did not agree to an interview for this story.

"For people to continue harboring that 'Big Lie' that's not good for democracy. It's not good for democracy at all," said Wisconsin's Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Evers vetoed a series of Republican bills that would have changed how elections are run in Wisconsin.

"Senate Bill 292: not approved there we go, folks," said Evers while delivering his veto message for SB 292 on Aug. 10, 2021.

During a ceremony in the Wisconsin state Capitol's rotunda on Aug. 10, 2021, Gov. Tony Evers vetoes SB 292, which related to broadcasting election night proceedings. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

Michels has said he would sign those bills, and Democrats fear as governor, Michels could overturn Wisconsin's presidential electoral votes in 2024.

"If they are in power and Trump comes calling asking them to change an election result, we've seen that they're willing to do anything to get Trump's approval," said Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

"This is a very serious moment in the history of our country, and it's hard to think of words that would be too strong to express the stakes in this fall's election," added Wikler.

"You know, when you look at it, election integrity has been a great topic for everybody to get some fodder both ways," said Paul Farrow, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

"When I look back at the 2020 election, there are some challenges. We know there are issues that are there that we have to figure out how to regulate and how to make sure it doesn't happen again," added Farrow.

"How can you lead the state if you're afraid to tell the base of our party the truth? asked Rohn Bishop, former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County.

Bishop is concerned the GOP's obsession with 2020 will hurt them in 2022.

"Republicans should be looking at a tidal wave election. The one way to screw it up is to keep focusing on 2020. And we keep doing that. We just can't turn the page and focus on 2022," he said.

Bishop was attacked by his own party members for pointing out Trump lost in Wisconsin because enough Republicans voted, but not for Trump.

"The election's not stolen when Glenn Grothman's getting more votes than Donald Trump in the 6th Congressional District," said Bishop. "There was just a falloff. There were people who wanted to vote for Republican conservative principles, but not Trump."

Rohn Bishop, the former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County and the mayor of Waupun, says fellow Republicans are too focused on the 2020 presidential vote and ostracize those who don't subscribe to conspiracy theories about it. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

Bishop said when Michels campaigns with Gableman and Trump, he risks alienating those same voters.

"Coming into 2022, Tim Michaels has to figure out how to get those 50,000 Republicans who voted Republican but not for Donald Trump," said Bishop.

Since the 2020 election, Bishop left party politics and in April 2022 was elected mayor of Waupun, a non-partisan office.

"I just really want to focus on this job and give it all that I have," said Bishop.

He's still a Republican, but worries others might have left the party for good.

"Because of the hyper-partisan nature of it and the negativity, we're busy trying to always kick people out. That's a term that they use in our party of the RINO: Republican in Name Only. I've been called that by people because I didn't think the election was stolen. Well, if you kick me out and I don't vote for you, you're in a lot of trouble," said Bishop.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Waukesha on Aug. 5, 2022, with Republican candidate for governor Tim Michels, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls also giving speeches. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

So what impact will these conspiracy theories have on the 2022 election?

For one, there will be a lot more people in the room when voters cast their ballots.

Paul Farrow said in 2020, Republicans had about 1,300 election observers at the polls statewide.

"We are well over 5,000 this time around," he said about the party's 2022 plans. "We've got a lot more eyes that are watching the process."

People like Christopher Bossert, a Republican from West Bend: "I had concerns about election integrity. And the best way to resolve those concerns one way or the other is to get involved. So I chose to volunteer for the Republican Party as a poll worker."

Christopher Bossert, a member of the Washington County Board of Supervisors and resident of West Bend, is a Republican who is volunteering as a poll worker to help assuage his concerns about election practices. (Credit: PBS Wisconsin)

Bossert said he still has concerns about voter fraud elsewhere in Wisconsin, but is no longer worried about the Dominion voting machines used in his hometown, even if his neighbors aren't convinced.

"I have constituents who believe Dominion is a problem," said Bossert, "and even though I've told them from what I can see, Dominion's not a problem, they still believe it.

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Wisconsin Republicans still fixated on 2020 election in 2022 - PBS Wisconsin