Conspiracy theorist said to have been key promoter of false rumour about immigrants ex-president repeated in debate

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.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    131·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        I brought up Jones because he was one of the main purveyors of 9/11 conspiracy theories as well as other conspiracy theories.

        Love of Bush means you won’t buy the conspiracy, because you think Bush is a hero and wouldn’t do any such thing. That was the majority of conservatives at the time. Bush was so fucking popular he won the popular vote in 2004, something most other modern Republican Presidents have failed to do, relying on Electoral College wins. Despite the release of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in May 2004, a full 5 months before the election. (Michael Moore is traditionally leftist…)

        Believing the Bush administration committed war crimes was absolutely tied to believing that we had entered unjust wars over false pretenses.