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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    2 months 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.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      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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        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.

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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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        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.

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        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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            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.

      • superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        When he said that it just made it so much worse. So he sees something on TV, decides it will benefit him in some way, so he repeats it.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        What he believes is irrelevant except as mens rea, but at the same time he has given constant indication that he fully believes whatever is most convenient at the time. This is an individual who after over a decade involved in politics has embraced the card says moops with a consistency and commitment that surely must be pathological

    • 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.

  • 2ugly2live@lemmy.world
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    Okay, and?

    Trump still said that shit. If Walz went to Harris and said, “The radical right is injecting holy water in babies’ eyes so they can see the lord” and she just said that shit without checking, I’d be looking at her sideways too. He went to a national debate and sputtered out nonsense that he didn’t verify or even question. That shit’s on him.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      And it’s not Walz to compare that to. It’s more like if Natalie Wynn or another bread tuber did it. There’s a level of assumed trust between vp candidate and presidential candidate that this completely lacks (and this still would violate it). This lady is just some low level pundit calling herself a journalist

      • qarbone@lemmy.world
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        I think the connection is that it became a talking point because Vance brought it up. While it’s likely he doesn’t listen to Vance unless it’s filtered through an LCD, I think the comparison is pretty apt

  • 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??

    • BarqsHasBite@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.

        • BarqsHasBite@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.

    • 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.

    • 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…

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • 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.

  • Gumby@lemmy.world
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    Maybe they should actually - hear me out here - blame, I dunno, Donald Trump for what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth? Rather than whatever idiot planted the most recent brain-dead conspiracy theory into his head? There will always be more idiots with brain-dead conspiracy theories, so maybe, just maybe, your candidate for President of the United States shouldn’t be a complete moron who falls for every single one of them?

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      Their constituents also always fall for these brain dead conspiracy theories.
      Because Trump said it and is being mocked for it they are currently falling over themselves to prove that it’s real. Anything that looks like evidence proves it is true, any lack of evidence proves the Liberal Deep State is hiding it.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, I too don’t understand why everyone around him is just OK with the idea of the guy being a completely responsibility-free empty vessel.

      It seems that once again they want to absolve this…former president of all responsibilities, but him being responsible for what comes out of his donkey-brained mouth is the lowest possible bar of accountability before the bar clangs to the floor.

      • shastaxc@lemm.ee
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        They love that about him because he can be manipulated to do anything they want. They just get upset when other people do it.

  • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
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    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?

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      Meanwhile ex-staffers for Harris are upset that she asks them questions about the things they present her.

  • 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.

  • wjrii@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    Charge her with incitement for every crime against these people. This is such a heinous thing to do.

    And if you want proof that American Christianity is a tribal identity not a belief in the gospels it’s the fact that it’s the people demanding this be a Christian nation terrorizing these refugees who happen to be predominately Christian

  • Bluefalcon@discuss.tchncs.de
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    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.