By MEREDITH DELISO and WILL STEAKIN, ABC News
(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — A speaker scheduled to appear on the second night of the Republican National Convention was pulled from the lineup hours after she promoted an anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory on Twitter.
Mary Ann Mendoza was scheduled to appear about an hour into the convention Tuesday night in a video message, one of several women voicing their support for President Donald Trump.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh confirmed that Mendoza was dropped.
“We have removed the scheduled video from the convention lineup and it will no longer run this week,” he said in a statement to ABC News.
The campaign did not cite a reason for dropping Mendoza, but the move comes after The Daily Beast reported that early Tuesday morning, Mendoza shared in a since-deleted tweet an anti-Semitic thread on the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family. The thread claimed that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave non-Jews and promote world wars,” and included references to the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, the Daily Beast said.
Mendoza took to Twitter Tuesday night to apologize for “not paying attention to the intent of the whole message,” and said that the thread “does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever.”
This was not the first time Mendoza referenced the Rothschilds on Twitter. In November 2018, she tweeted another message with anti-Semitic language, saying, “The Rothschilds have used their globalist media mouthpiece to declare that Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the New World Order!”
According to RNC organizers, Mendoza, who sits on the campaign’s Women for Trump advisory board, was set to talk Tuesday night about her son, an Arizona police officer who was killed in 2014 in a head-on collision by an undocumented immigrant.
In a preview of her prepared remarks provided by the RNC, Mendoza said that Trump is the “first political leader we’ve ever seen take on the radical left to finally secure our border and to end illegal immigration since day one. I’ve met him many times and I know what’s in his heart … I know what he hopes and dreams for this country.”
The Biden campaign reacted to Mendoza’s initial inclusion in the RNC, expressing condolences for her loss but adding that the choice was “not surprising” given Trump’s “both sides” reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville protests and his embrace of “fringe movements,” including QAnon, which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terror threat.
“As much as they may try to disguise it, giving room for these ideas is what Trump has done from Day One,” the campaign’s Jewish engagement director, Aaron Keyak, said in a statement. “No parade of speakers can drown out the phrase ‘very fine people on both sides’ after the anti-Semites marched in Charlottesville to the chant of the ‘Jews will not replace us.’ To anyone really watching and listening, that refusal of Trump to condemn such hatred still rings loudly and clearly.”
At least two QAnon supporters who are running for Congress — Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert — have said they’ve been invited to the White House for Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday.
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