(JTA) — Mary Ann Mendoza, a mother who had been scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night, was dropped from the program after she urged her Twitter followers to read a thread from an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
Hours before her scheduled appearance at the convention, Mendoza shared a months-long thread posted by a feed called WarNuse that includes multiple anti-Semitic slanders, including arguing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery that claims Jews control the world, is not a fabrication.
“Do yourself a favor and read this thread,” she posted.
Virtually every tweet in the thread, posted by an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, reflects anti-Semitic tropes. After The Daily Beast published a story about Mendoza’s tweet, she deleted it and said she had not paid attention to everything in the thread.
“I retweeted a very long thread earlier without reading every post within the thread,” she said. “My apologies for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message. That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever.”
But Mendoza had tweeted previously about the theory, which holds that the Rothschild banking family has engineered an international war. In November 2018, she shared a now-deleted tweet and wrote, “And there you have it: The Rothschilds have used their globalist media mouthpiece to declare that Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the New World!”
Mendoza is an “Angel Mom,” the term that President Donald Trump, whom Mendoza had been set to endorse formally, uses to describe mothers of victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants. Mendoza’s son was killed by a drunk driver with a criminal record.
Trump has embraced candidates who have affiliations with QAnon, even as top Republican Party officials have distanced themselves from the theory and its adherents. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congressional nominee from Georgia, said Tuesday she would be present Thursday at the White House when Trump accepts the nomination. Greene, a onetime QAnon enthusiast, has also dabbled in anti-Semitic tropes.
Also speaking is Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who in 2017 said on Twitter, “I have a hard time understanding how people can’t see the connection between abortion and the Jewish holocaust.”
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