Convention drama got a head start on Tuesday morning when Mary Ann Mendoza, a speaker scheduled for the convention’s second night, urged her Twitter followers to read up on a Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land. After the matter was reported on by the Daily Beast, the Republican National Convention quietly removed her from its evening programming.
An “angel mom” who was expected to speak about the death of her son — a police officer who was killed in a car accident with a drunk driver who was undocumented — Mendoza began her day by encouraging her audience to do themselves “a favor and read this thread.” As the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer explained, the tweets in question were a combination of virulent anti-Semitism and more new-school QAnon references:
Mendoza had linked to a lengthy thread from a QAnon conspiracy theorist that laid out a fevered, anti-Semitic view of the world. In its telling, the Rothschilds — a famous Jewish banking family from Germany — created a plot to terrorize non-Jewish “goyim,” with purported details of their scheme that included plans to “make the goyim destroy each other” and “rob the goyim of their landed properties.”
Drawing on more than a century’s worth of anti-Semitic hoaxes and smears, the thread claimed that malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave non-Jews and promote world wars. Riddled with QAnon references, the thread from Twitter user @WarNuse claimed that the Titanic had been sunk to protect the Federal Reserve, and that every president between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump was a “slave president” in the thrall of a global cabal.
The thread also promoted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-Semitic hoax popular in Nazi Germany, and claimed that its allegations about a Jewish plot to control the world are real.
Mendoza — who has tweeted anti-Semitic claims before — deleted her endorsement of the thread after the publication of the Daily Beast report and apologized “for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message.” She is also on the advisory board of We Build the Wall, the fundraising group whose leaders, including Steve Bannon, were indicted for fraud last week.
Though the RNC made the safe decision by removing Mendoza from the lineup, there are at least two other minor guests this week who have conspiracist leanings. Rebecca Friedrichs, a school-choice advocate who addressed the convention on Monday, has asserted that public schools can be used to “groom children” for sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein. And on Tuesday, Republican House nominee and QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she had been invited to attend the president’s nomination speech at the White House on Thursday.
