RNC drops speaker after anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy tweet
26 August 2020
Mary Ann Mendoza, who was scheduled to address the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, was pulled from the program hours before it began after she retweeted an anti-Semitic rant on Twitter, which has since been deleted.
Why it matters: Mendoza urged her more than 40,000 Twitter followers to investigate an alleged Jewish plot to enslave the world, linking to a thread of tweets from a QAnon conspiracy theorist, The Daily Beast first reported.
- Mendoza was supposed to be at the GOP convention representing “angel moms,” a term the president made popular among his base that denotes a mother whose child was killed by an undocumented immigrant.
- Mendoza’s son was killed in 2014 by a drunk driver who was living in the U.S. illegally.
What she's saying: After various media outlets covered her tweet, Mendoza deleted the thread and posted that she had “retweeted a very long thread earlier without reading every post within the thread.”
- "My apologies for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message. That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever," she wrote.
Axios reached out to the Republican National Committee for comment and has not heard back.
Go deeper:QAnon's 2020 resurgence
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.