Inventor Jovan Pulitzer is a pillar of the MAGA election-fraud movement. His theories were integrated into the Arizona audit and a pro-coup PowerPoint presentation that reached Donald Trump’s chief of staff.
But last week, Trumpworld’s genius inventor prank-called one of his haters by posing as a restaurant employee clarifying an order for a “cock sandwich.”
“I have a text order on our system for a cock sandwich,” Pulitzer told the man’s voicemail, live-streaming the video to his fans. “I need to know: Do you want that circumcised, uncircumcised? We can serve you the circumcision like calamari if you want. But we need to know if you want dipping sauce.”
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Also on the night’s prank agenda: Calling a woman who had criticized him by offering to talk about the size of his penis. “I actually like women that want to call me and talk about my dick,” Pulitzer said.
Pulitzer’s change from a leading light of the Arizona audit into a juvenile prank-caller comes in the aftermath of the Arizona audit’s failure, as figures who promised the audit would uncover serious election malfeasance point fingers at one another over who’s to blame. Amid that disappointment, Pulitzer and a one-time ally, former New Mexico State University professor turned itinerant audit advocate David Clements, have turned on each other in a bitter feud that’s featured doxxing and allegations that Pulitzer is taking advantage of his followers by packaging his election-fraud theories into a book that costs a whopping $250.
The crackup between Clements and Pulitzer mirrors the larger chaos in the world of election-fraud personalities on the right. While the false claims of election tampering have provided great fodder for conservative media and Republican lawmakers looking to limit voting, the personalities behind the conspiracy theories have found themselves holding the bag.
And Pulitzer and Clements aren’t the only ones fighting as the failed effort to overturn the election passes its one-year anniversary. Defamation lawyer Lin Wood and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn have been slamming each other for over a month, with Wood releasing surreptitiously recorded audio of Flynn, who has been embraced by QAnon believers, criticizing the conspiracy theory.
Pulitzer’s clash with Clements began after the former professor suggested that Pulitzer was slow-rolling the release of his own information about the election and criticized the handling of the Arizona audit.
“How many millions of dollars were needlessly spent on a scanning show?” Clements wrote in a Telegram post.
Pulitzer ratcheted up his feud with Clements, who was fired from his tenure-track position as a business professor after he refused to be vaccinated. In a furious audio recording posted to Telegram on Wednesday, Pulitzer raged against Clements, calling him a “fucking fraud” who had exaggerated his academic bona fides to dupe Trump supporters and alleging Clements had sabotaged audits in other states.
“I will stab you in the face with the truth,” Pulitzer said, addressing Clements, adding, “You’re the last son of a bitch I want praying for me.”
In an email to The Daily Beast, Pulitzer said his remark about stabbing was a play on words, rather than a threat. Clements didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Pulitzer’s audio incensed Clements and his supporters.
“I really haven’t hung my head on being a college professor,” Clements, whose Telegram account and personal website are called “The Professor’s Record,” said in a video.
Clements went on the attack himself, accusing Pulitzer of grifting gullible Trump supporters with a recent book. The origins of Pulitzer’s fame on the right centers on his invention of “kinematic artifact detection,” an unproven technology that Pulitzer insists can detect folds in ballots that can then miraculously determine if they’re fraudulent. Pulitzer has been vague about the details of his technology, but in October he released a $250 book that promises to reveal how it works.
Amazon reviewers haven’t been impressed, with one one-star reviewer claiming it’s a “pseudo-sci grift” packed with content already available elsewhere. In a video to his supporters, Clements agreed, claiming Pulitzer was hurting the audit cause by packaging his information in a typo-ridden book that’s “clear as mud.”
“You don’t have to take my word for it—just look at the spine of the cover alone,” Clements said.
Clements then held up his copy of Pulitzer’s book, which had a typo, “Kinematic Artifac Detection,” written on its spine.
For his part, Pulitzer told The Daily Beast he deliberately set the price high so he could make copies for himself while preventing people from buying the book.
Pulitzer’s clash with Clements went even further Wednesday night when Pulitzer published Clements’s phone number on Telegram to his more than 70,000 followers, prompting waves of harassment for the former professor. Clements responded by doing the same to Pulitzer, directing his supporters to contact the inventor and inspiring Pulitzer’s prank calls to his critics.
The Big Lie crack-up has also included recent allegations that Pulitzer and others were poisoned with anthrax at a conference, with the intimation that a rival conservative personality might have been behind the attack. Given the spread of the coronavirus, however, the culprit behind several people becoming sick at an indoor conference devoted to flouting vaccine and masking recommendations seems more obvious.
