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.

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.

  • deconstruct@lemm.ee
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    21 days ago

    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.

    • haunte@leminal.space
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      21 days ago

      Greene is just jealous she’s not the one getting the attention. It’s the same reason she had a feud with Boebert. She’s desperate for attention and trump approval.

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      21 days ago

      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.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      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.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        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.

    • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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      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.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        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.

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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          “But the TV said it so it’s not my fault for saying it again!”

          It’s kind of like Tucker Carlson’s approach with “I’m just asking questions.” No, you’re spewing bullshit and trying to spin it as curiosity.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    Trump knew it was bullshit. He just forgot that his audience wasn’t his brainwashed supporters.

    Either that or he actually believed it was real. And I don’t know which one is worse.

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        21 days ago

        Yeah he’s not nearly clever enough to be two-faced about this kind of stuff. He just believes whatever the people around him tell him to believe. It might be the scariest thing about him as Commander in Chief really.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        21 days ago

        The way he responded about the official statement reveals how he views all public servants as well. Paraphrasing the response to the official statement: “yeah, well that’s a nice thing for an official to say. But I saw it on TV what they were saying!”

        His initial reaction is essentially “of course the official is lying, that’s what you do.”

        • BigPotato@lemmy.world
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          Plus, he had “concept of a plan” in his front pocket. He had that think ready. If nothing else, his debate prep got that in his head.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            He had it ready because he’s said it before and has been saying it since 2015. Seth Myers ran a supercut in his post-debate special.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      With his feeble age and memory, he’s grown paranoid where he doesn’t even trust his team. So the people nearest to him are whispering.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    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??

    • someguy3@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        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.

        • someguy3@lemmy.world
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          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.zone
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            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.

    • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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      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.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        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…

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    Republicans are blaming the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for this week’s botched debate performance by Donald Trump

    Mmmhmm.

    If that’s the case, no doubt Mr. Trump will desire to get rid of Loomer and then take on Harris in a second debate without that damaging baggage hanging around.

  • wjrii@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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.

  • Bluefalcon@discuss.tchncs.de
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    21 days ago

    What about his comments on windmills, Mexican people, immigrants, the central park 5, soldiers, disable people… Fuck this POS doesn’t nerd help being a shit person. His domain expansion is being the worse person you ever met.

  • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
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    21 days ago

    This is another sign of weakness and his unfitness for presidency. What’s Trump for a president if he cannot stand and take responsibility for his own utterings?

  • TheHotze@lemmy.world
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    I wanted to make a joke about Trumps campaign admitting that he believes anything the people around say, but then I remembered the goat dewormer and injecting bleach claims and it’s not funny anymore.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    In today’s news of “Every accusation the GOP makes is an admission of guilt”:

    GOP accuses immigrants of eating pets, while today the GOP began eating its own pet, Laura Loomer.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • nifty@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    So they fixed the electoral college, and they know victory is all but certain. That’s why they came up with the most cruel and despicable lie so that when Trump wins, despite losing the debate, progressives and leftists and sane people will be heartbroken and soul shattered.

    This is how you know the electoral college is fixed, they have no fear of repercussions

    • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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      If the electoral college didn’t exist, then all you had to do was campaign in LA, SFO, ATL and NY and ignore the rest of the country because popular vote wins and the biggest population centers would matter more. This is a really stupid fucking take please stfu about abolishing the EC because abolishing it results in politicians ignore minorities and their issues (i.e. racism, poverty, etc)

  • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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    21 days ago

    I can see how an unrepentant compulsive liar would want to style themselves as an “investigative journalist”.