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.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    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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      2 months ago

      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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        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
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          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.zone
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            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.

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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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      2 months ago

      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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        2 months ago

        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.