Conspiracy theorist said to have been key promoter of false rumour about immigrants ex-president repeated in debate
Republicans are blaming the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for this week’s botched debate performance by Donald Trump, which included the former president repeating a bizarre and unfounded claim that pet cats and dogs were being eaten by Haitian immigrants.
Loomer flew with Trump on his private plane to Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia and has been identified as a key promoter of the pets rumour, which has been dismissed as false by authorities in Springfield, Ohio, where the practice was alleged to have been taking place.
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Loomer, who styles herself as an “investigative journalist”, last year promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that 9/11 was an”inside job”. On Wednesday she posted an unfounded allegation that Harris had worn earphones disguised as earrings during the debate.
There’s a leopard-ate-my-face quality to this. Acting surprised when crazy conspiracy theorists are invited into the campaign.
It’s rich that it’s MTG pushing back though, the infamous peddler of Jewish space lasers theories.
That’s the problem with infinitely escalating insanity in a party, there’s always a newer more insane level of insanity. MTG is a moderate now.
last year promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that 9/11 was an”inside job”.
How did this one go from leftists in the early 2000’s who thought Bush and Cheney ignored intelligence to let it happen to unhinged conspiratorial right wingers spouting the same bullshit. Leftists back then blamed it on warmongering and letting it happen so Bush could use the excuse to become a deeply loved “war President” (It worked… for a while) and Cheney could make a mint with no-bid contracts for Halliburton to rebuild Iraq. That… at least made some sort of sense. What’s the right-wing excuse for it being an inside job?
It’s like right-wingers decided to exploit valid distrust in the news media as stenographers for the government to make everyone crazy. The thing that’s crazy about it working is the distrust was sewn by them to begin with and then they turned around to exploit that same distrust. How do people not see that??
Funny, I just mentioned PNAC in another post earlier today.
I am never going to not believe bush/Cheney/runsfeld were in some part aware of/responsible for what happened.
Oh, same. There was boatloads of evidence that they just sort of… let it happen so they could exploit the situation. PNAC outlined that they needed “another Pearl Harbor.” They were honestly just as open as Project 2025 but back then no one took it as seriously as that even though they amount to the same thing.
That’s why it’s so fucked that it has become a right wing conspiracy…
go from leftists
I never got the impression that 9/11 conspiracy theories were from leftists, though I could be wrong. I thought it was from everywhere.
I had every right winger freaking out that Bush and Cheney were beyond reproach and nothing could be further from the truth at the time. I lived in Louisiana and I learned to just shut the fuck up about it because people fucking loved Bush more than their own god damned families. Honestly, the environment wasn’t that much different from what we’re dealing with in terms of Trump.
Now it’s fucking gospel for half of the right wing. I don’t get it.
Although to be fair, Alex Jones was promoting that stuff at the time, and he’s been the throughline in the last 20 years. But people also assumed he was a leftist back then, too. The people showing me his Prison Planet videos in 2004-2005 that crowed that Bush was building prison camps were all super leftist people.
Actually, to be clear, this guy is the first person who ever showed me Alex Jones/Prison Planet:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whatever-happened-to-pizza-at-mcdonalds/id1152856686
https://open.spotify.com/show/7pbtiktDvlEAyFHT7KR98Y
Brian Thompson of the Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald’s podcast. He was my neighbor and coworker at a local news station. He almost got fired because he was working the chyron and had jokingly changed it from “Donald Rumsfeld - Secretary of Defense” to “Donald Rumsfeld - War Criminal” and then accidentally put the joke on the air. Generally people who considered the Bush admin guilty of war crimes weren’t right wingers.
Ok you’re moving around a lot. This was about 9/11 conspiracies. Not love of Bush, not prison camps, not war crimes, (a lot of all that is the some people playing into the “you’re either with us or against us”). Those are all different than 9/11 conspiracies.
How did this one go from leftists in the early 2000’s who thought Bush and Cheney ignored intelligence to let it happen to unhinged conspiratorial right wingers spouting the same bullshit.
The exact same way that both the left and the right agree that Epstein didn’t kill himself, except one side thinks the AG of the then-current President who oversaw the DoJ and had connections to Epstein was responsible, and the other side thinks the presidential candidate that lost to Trump and retired from politics and has zero connections to the administration of the prison did it.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that even the ones grounded in reality and reasonable evidence attract the sort of people easily drawn into conspiracy theories as well as changing some people into them. And those people eventually find their way into the rabbit hole that leads towards deciding that problems must be caused by someone, and that someone must be those who are different and ends with accusing the Jews and gays of intentionally masterminding the destruction of society.
BUT HE HEARD IT ON THE TV!
I love that that was his excuse while he was simultaneously on tv being told by someone else on tv that it wasn’t true lol.
Not to mention that this is the guy who popularized, in his 2016 campaign, the term “fake news”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news#Donald_Trump’s_misuse_of_term
Trump has claimed that the mainstream American media (which he calls the “lying press”) regularly reports “fake news” or “hoax news”, despite the fact that he generated considerable false and inaccurate or misleading statements himself.
Trump has often attacked mainstream news reporting publications, deeming them “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”.[255][256][257][258][259] Every few days, Trump would issue a threat against the press due to his claims of “fake news”.
In September 2018, National Public Radio noted that Trump has expanded his use of the terms fake and phony to “an increasingly wide variety of things he doesn’t like”: “The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about “fake books,” “the fake dossier,” “fake CNN,” and he added a new claim—that Google search results are “RIGGED” to mostly show only negative stories about him.” They graphed his expanding use in columns labeled: “Fake news”, "Fake (other) and “Phony”.
I mean, I’m not gonna say that he’s the person in the world who could least-reasonablly make the assertion that anything on TV must be true with any degree of self-consistency, but he has got to be pretty high on the list.
EDIT: See, that would be the kind of thing that I think that it’d be fun to have Jon Stewart doing one of his “past politician vs current politician” things on.
That comment was almost even better than the “they’re eating pets” one. How absolutely insane that someone running for Commander in Chief would think “I saw it on TV” is a good defense on a fact check.
And the way he said it, all whiny, like it isn’t his fault if the racist lie he repeated isn’t true because his source of information is both unimpeachable and not his responsibility.
She may be the idiot that kick-started the conspiracy but certainly was not alone thinking it was a winning attack.
AZ GOP booked 12 billboards in the Phoenix Metro area with this bs.
Former Arizona GOP chair Robert Graham told Axios the billboards are a “complete waste of money” because few voters are familiar with the rumors in the first place.
- “When you’re in election time you’re trying to inspire people to vote for your candidate, not make them solve a puzzle,” Graham said. “Republicans have a healthy message, or could have — it’s jobs, opportunity, prosperity, safety. We believe Republican governing principles are the best. We don’t need to put cow suits on the words.”
- Graham, who partially lived in Haiti for 11 years, said he didn’t think most people would find the billboards offensive, though, “I would take offense if I was Haitian, for sure.”
Wow. A GOP using and making sense.
MTG is just happy she finally found someone (slightly) more racist than her:
“If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand,” Loomer wrote.
