Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

CONCORD, N.C.—Behind this small-town, North Carolina storefront, there was very little doubt that the election is rigged. Watching the last presidential debate projected onto the wall of the office of the Cabarrus County GOP, a dozen local Republicans had gathered to eat snacks and suffer the indignity of watching their candidate taken down by the Clinton Media Machine. On Fox.

“I can’t take this anymore!” yelled a woman dressed head to toe in Donald Trump regalia, jumping out of her seat. “He’s not letting him talk! I’ve been timing it: She gets two minutes, he gets 30 seconds. She gets three minutes, he gets 45 seconds!” She stormed toward the door.


But we were watching Fox, I pointed out. And the moderator, Chris Wallace, was a Fox anchor. She pivoted toward me, fuming.

“He hates Trump! He’s mad that he didn’t come on his show!” she shouted. “Fox News is just as much out to get him as the liberal media! Just as much as Politico!” Here she paused and let out her next phrase slowly, with as much indignation as she could muster. “Y’all are horrible,” she growled, and stormed out, slamming the door, rattling the office’s all-glass façade.

That was around the five-minute mark.

North Carolina might look to pollsters like a swing state that has shifted toward Hillary Clinton over the past month, and national Republican leaders might have vacillated on Trump, pulling away after his aggressive comments about women were leaked on tape, and 10 women have come forward accusing the Republican candidate of sexual assault. But the Cabarrus County GOP was having none of it.

This suburb of Charlotte is a deep red. Mitt Romney took the county by 20 points, and Trump won the March primary here with 42 percent. Ted Cruz, in second place, was 14 points behind. It is three-quarters white and aging, with young people taking off for Charlotte. “You’re in the Bible Belt,” Mike Tallent, a 52-year-old truck mechanic and head of the Cabarrus County GOP, told me as we sat in a back office before the debate. The room, as he pointed out, was probably the processing room of what had been a butcher shop. “It is a very Christian part of the country. This county is actually dry. You can only buy alcohol in the municipalities.”

A big chunk of America—maybe a third, maybe more—hasn’t been swayed by anything Trump has done, or anything the GOP establishment has said about him. It’s been observed that many of these voters occupy a universe not just culturally different from the “elites” in cities and coastal suburbs, but factually different as well, with its own narrative and set of data points about Clinton, Trump and the universe.

At the debate Wednesday night, every twist, turn and argument came with a frustrated counterpoint from the watchers. Not long after Wallace sent the woman storming out, Clinton began to address what she described as Trump’s unrealistic plan to deport over 10 million people. A woman sitting next to me—Otrud “Oddy” Crist, Ph.D.—quickly shuffled through her papers until she found the right one. “Eisenhower deported 23 million people in 1952,” she said, pointing to the sheet, “and it wasn’t that big a deal.” (She was referring to Operation Wetback of 1954, in which the federal government deported hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants.)

“Have you noticed the typing?” asked an older gentleman named Don Rufty. “Have you noticed that, when she talks, it’s across him. And when he talks, it’s also across him. Don’t you think that’s weird?” He pointed my attention to Trump and Clinton on the wall. After a few puzzled moments, I saw what he meant: In fact, the closed captioning was hanging on the left side of the screen, which, incidentally or not so incidentally, was also where Trump was for most of the debate. I tried, feebly, to offer up a light shave with Occam’s razor, but Rufty raised his eyebrows and shrugged at me, a gesture of bemused mercy toward my blindness.

***

Nearby Charlotte is a scary, urban specter of expensive, loose living and violence committed by people with strange names. “They have issues in Charlotte with people that do things that get in trouble, OK? And quite often they end up being illegals,” Tallent said. “It doesn’t take long to get it into your head when you watch the news and you see that 10 people get in trouble, and half of them are of this ethnicity group, three of them are this ethnicity group, and two of them are this ethnicity group, it doesn’t take long for somebody to go, ‘There’s a problem here.’”

What are the three ethnicities, I asked?

“Oh, that’s on you to figure that one out,” he said, raising his eyebrows with meaning. “I’ll make it simple for you: A lot of times, you get the impression that there could be different ones in each group. You have one ethnicity that’s a lot more prominent than others, that seems to have a big problem with drugs. Now, I’m not saying that white people don’t do drugs, because Lord knows they do.” The explanation went on for a while—“there are African-American people, there are Jamaicans, there are real African-Africans”—and it seemed to be the response to an earlier statement Tallent made and had refused to clarify: that Trump resonates with people here “because he says a lot of things people want to say but can’t because they gotta have jobs.”

Tallent was also of the opinion that the election isn't exactly fair, and that the main prosecutors of the fixing are the media, who are “incredibly biased.” “The majority of the media comes through the liberal arts system, and have a liberal arts mentality,” he explained, “which is usually a liberal mentality.”

This has been a classic opinion on the right for the past decade, but what surprised me that evening was the hostility toward Fox and Wallace, a Fox News anchor (and registered Democrat) who, to them, was clearly in the tank for Hillary, constantly interrupting Trump instead of her, not bringing up crucial issues like 30,000 deleted emails and Benghazi, allowing her to evade answering the question—like the one on Bill’s infidelities—and letting her ramble on without regard for the clock.

And so those gathered in this former Concord butcher shop took it upon themselves to fact-check and unrig the debate, which, given the totality of the bias against Trump, could be fixed only with a wholesale discarding of everything potentially negative, improbable or imperfect about him, or anything potentially positive or validating about Clinton.

“How long does she get!” yelled a retired salesman named Ken. “How long does she get!” A few sentences into Clinton’s two-minute response, Ken yelled again, holding up his wrist in the air. “That was four minutes!” he shouted. A couple of sentences later, he held up his wrist again: “That was over six minutes!”

“Have you noticed that the moderator only interrupts him?” a middle-aged woman in red lipstick named Lorie asked.

“She can say anything and get away with it,” Crist said, shaking her head. “All right, cut off her mic!” she yelled at the screen.

When it came time to talk about the Obama administration accusing the Russian government of hacking the U.S. elections, Lorie smelled something fishy. “What have the Russians hacked?” she asked me.

I offered that, other than the Democratic National Committee emails, they’ve hacked several voter registration rolls and voting machines, but she still looked skeptical.

“[Billionaire investor George] Soros has done that,” Crist gently corrected me.

“Oh, really?” Lorie said. “OK.”

When Clinton accused Trump of using Chinese steel to build the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, Lorie was perplexed. “What was he supposed to do?” Lorie said. “Do we have a steel industry?”

When Clinton, echoing President Barack Obama, accused Trump of whining, Crist set her straight. “No,” she said. “You’re whining.” Trump, in contrast, looked very presidential. “He’s been really calm and quiet the whole time. I think Governor Pence has had an influence on him, he’s been so even,” she said in reference to Mike Pence, Trump's running mate.

When the debate turned to election rigging, Ken yelled, “They have 4 million dead voters!”

“Eight million!” Crist yelled back.

“Really?” Ken responded. “I heard 4 million.”

Regardless, interjected a man named Mike, “When Obama was elected, the committee that looked into that was let go.”

It was all very troubling.

***

When Clinton went after Trump for supporting the war in Iraq, saying there was audio to prove it, Lorie was incensed that Wallace didn’t call her out on it. “When it’s his audio, it’s true, but when it’s her”—calling people “deplorable,” calling Bernie Sanders supporters basement dwellers—“it, oh, you didn’t play the rest of the tape, it’s not true. It’s such a double standard!”

When Wallace didn’t press Clinton on her foundation, Ken went wild. “You raised billions of dollars! Where is it? Where did it go?” he yelled at the screen.

“Chelsea makes $900,000 a year,” Lorie said, enunciating each number. “You’re about her age,” she said, turning to me. “Do you make $900,000 a year?” She added, “That’s the thing. I just can’t trust her.”

When Wallace pressed Trump on attacking the women who accused him of sexual assault, a young man named Brandon Rojas was incensed. “So you’re going to go after him for having standards?!” (He was also upset by the contradiction he saw in women saying they were assaulted, “but, oh, it’s OK for women to end a human life.”)

Crist and Lorie were not buying the accusations, either. Armrests in first-class seats don’t go up, and there was that cousin who said Summer Zervos was lying. And the timing. The timing of it was all so suspicious, especially to these women. “Why would they not have come forward earlier?” Lorie asked. “He was a billionaire for a very long time. I mean, here’s an opportunity to put some money in their pockets!”

“When you have women who are around rich men, they would like nothing more than to get their attention,” Crist told me. She is 77 and knows the ways of mankind. “If they throw themselves at the men, it’s their fault! It’s not the men’s fault!”

Moreover, Wallace didn’t force Clinton to answer the question about the alleged sexual assaults by her husband—whose victims the women believed because they had come forward and gone to court. “They ought to be talking what’s really illegal,” Crist said, referring to Bill Clinton, Benghazi, the emails, “not these stories that are just rumors.”

Then Wallace didn’t ask Clinton about the Project Veritas Action tape that purported to show her goons paying people to stir up violence at a Trump rally earlier this year. Rufty shook his head and turned to Crist.

“Didn’t you say it was like Kristallnacht?” he said.

Crist, who was emerging to be the evening’s resident fact-checker, nodded emphatically. In fact, she was seeing so many parallels to Nazi Germany, and it was frightening. The comparisons were not, as they tend to be on the left, between Hitler and Trump. Obama’s stimulus plan, she told me, “was just what Hitler did when he built the autobahns.” Mein Kampf “is one of Obama’s favorite books.” And America, the great country that had defeated Hitler, was about to be undone by Islam. “The Quran says ‘overthrow America,’” she explained to the group as the debate turned to terrorism. Earlier in the evening, she had handed me various documents, including one that began “Just in case you didn’t know…,” that showed how CIA Director John Brennan had apparently converted to Islam while stationed in the Middle East. Another flier showed how Obama put members of the Muslim Brotherhood in highly sensitive government positions. When I asked whether they were actually members of the Muslim Brotherhood or just Muslims, Crist squeezed her thumb and index finger together and said, “There’s this much difference between Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

By now, though, nobody was watching the debate, and instead they were discussing Trump’s wisdom in not paying his taxes—“he owes it to his shareholders to make as much money as possible,” Lorie’s 17-year-old son Clay said—and how Islam, according to Rojas, “was a violent religion,” unlike Christianity, “because God sent us Jesus to forgive us for our sins.”

“It’s not even a religion,” Crist interjected. “It’s a theocracy.”

“I’m going to go ahead and just call it idolatry,” Rojas laughed.

Crist, Lorie told me in a polite whisper when Oddy went to the bathroom, “is German, so that forms a lot of her view.” In fact, Crist told me, she had been born in Nazi Germany, “24 days before Hitler invaded Poland,” and her father had been conscripted into the German army. “He had no choice; Hitler was getting desperate,” she said. (This was in 1940.) Her mother, Crist said, had hidden Jews in Hamburg and her father smuggled food to Dutch Jews and was part of the Dutch underground while he was a German soldier in Nazi-occupied Holland. Unfortunately, Crist said, all these places were bombed by the allies and the documents proving her parents’ righteousness had all burned up. When she was 18, she married an American soldier and moved to California, where people all made fun of how she spoke and how she ate and assumed she was a Nazi. “They associated all Germans in the same bag,” she said, “like everyone was a Nazi.” It was so hard for her that she stopped talking for a year. “They talk about bullying, well, I got bullied,” she said. “A lot.”

“But my blood runs red, white and blue,” she said.

I asked her whether, given how she was allowed to come to this country yet had been painted with a broad brush, she saw any irony in how she wanted to block Muslims from coming to this country.

“Completely different,” she said. “Because the Quran teaches that they are the master race that they have to conquer the world.” As for American-born Muslims, “they’re sitting on a fence. They’re halfway here, taking advantage of the American stuff but still abiding by the Quran.” She told me all this after the debate was over, and Tallent had cleaned up and closed the office, and his colleague asked me to give them “a fair shake,” and Crist and I sat on a short wall in the dark parking lot as acorns thudded quietly onto car roofs around us.

“That’s another thing I have against Hillary,” Crist went on. “Here were are, a supposedly Christian nation, and she’s going to demand that they don’t believe in Jesus, that we give that up. And I told people, if she is demanding that, if she has nerve to say that, what is she going to do to the Jews?” She paused to let me consider that. “Because of what my parents did, I’m kind of protective of the Jews, they’re God’s chosen people, so I’m really leery of what she’s leading into. With all the Muslim countries she’s taken money from, she owes them favors, and I am just really leery of what they’re going to ask because they just don’t like the Jews.”

You think Hillary is going to kill all the Jews? I asked.

“I think it’s going to lead to that,” she said, looking out into the night. “As I say, I’m the one to call your attention to it. You go dig it up.”

