One of the speakers for the second night of the Republican National Convention was pulled from the program after The Daily Beast surfaced a tweet from her, earlier in the day, urging her followers to investigate a supposed Jewish plot to enslave the world.
“Do yourself a favor and read this thread,” Mary Ann Mendoza, who is a member of the Trump campaign’s advisory board, tweeted to her more than 40,000 followers Tuesday morning.
Mendoza, an “angel mom,” was scheduled to speak Tuesday about her son’s 2014 death at the hands of a drunk driver who was in the country illegally. But a Republican source familiar with the programming said the speech had been cancelled amid uproar over her tweet.
Hours earlier, 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.
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a fabrication,” the thread that Mendoza shared reads. “And, it certainly is not anti-semetic (sic) to point out this fact.”
After The Daily Beast published this article, Mendoza deleted her tweet and tweeted an apology “for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message.” While Mendoza had initially urged her followers to read the thread, she claimed on Tuesday evening that she had not read all of the posts in the thread.
“That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever,” Mendoza tweeted.
Though her speech was cancelled, the Mendoza episode is just the latest example of a convention speaker with a checkered background. As the Republican festivities enter their second night, several scheduled speakers have already been exposed for holding bizarre beliefs.
Public school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs, who spoke at the convention on Monday, has claimed that public schools use their curricula to “groom” children for sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Vice reported that anti-abortion activist and convention speaker Abby Johnson praised the idea of police racially profiling her biracial son as “smart.”
“Statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons,” Johnson said in a video.
Mendoza’s tweet urging her followers to check out the anti-Semitic thread came on the eve of her Republican convention appearance. While the thread includes extensive anti-Semitism and references to QAnon, it also alleges that Hillary Clinton is a “Satanic High Priestess” and that Barack Obama’s Washington home smells like sulfur — a reference to the idea, popular with InfoWars host Alex Jones, that Obama somehow smells like sulfur because he’s connected to the devil and Hell.
The Trump campaign and Mendoza didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century slammed Mendoza's one-time inclusion on the RNC schedule as "unacceptable."
“Mary Ann Mendoza's initial inclusion speaks volumes about the radicalization of the Republican Party under Donald Trump and where we're headed if he has four more years to spread hate and division from the White House,” Kyle Morse, a spokesman for American Bridge’s “Trump War Room” opposition research group said. “Trump and his campaign refused to speak out against anti-Semitism and only pulled Mendoza because they got caught.”
In addition to the thread she encouraged people to read, Mendoza also has posted her own tweets that push conspiracy theories about Democratic billionaire George Soros. One tweet from June 2019 claimed that Soros was pushing for more immigration to install a “one world government.”
“These are the violent types of people that SOROS, the ROTHCHILDS (sic) and the United Nations have NO problem using as pawns and uprooting them and bringing them to the USA to accomplish their ONE WORLD GOVT!” Mendoza tweeted.
Mendoza has alleged that public health advice advocating for mask-wearing are using the “Soros playbook,” and claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s lead infectious disease expert, is paid by Soros.
In a Sept. 2019 tweet, Mendoza called Soros, a Holocaust survivor, a “Nazi.”
“This Nazi is still at it & the progressives love him for it,” she wrote.