An "Angel Mom" on Donald Trump's campaign advisory board has instructed her Twitter followers to read a series of anti-semitic QAnon messages hours before she was set to appear on the second prime-time portion of the 2020 Republican National Convention.
In her now-deleted post on the platform, she linked to a thread promoting paranoid, anti-semitic beliefs that the Rothschild family established a plot for world domination, among other hoaxes, including "The Protocols of the Elder of Zion," a notorious booklet used as Nazi rationalisation for genocide.
The post, first reported by The Daily Beast, was shared with her more than 40,000 followers on Tuesday morning. She deleted her post moments after the story's publication
Ms Mendoza – whose son was killed in head-on collision with another car driven by a person living in the country without legal permission – was expected to address the GOP convention to discuss immigration and "sanctuary" policies. The event later announced she would not participate.
She is also an advisory board member for Women For Trump and was involved with We Build the Wall, the crowd-funding campaign for a US-Mexico border wall that federal prosecutors allege Steve Bannon and three other men used as a fence to launder donations.
After she deleted her post, she said: "I 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 had requested the Thread Reader app account, a "bot" that "unrolls" connected Twitter threads into a single document upon request, to "unroll" the conspiracy posts.
Her Twitter post with that request was also deleted. The Thread Reader app "unrolled" the thread following her request before 7am on Tuesday.
The FBI has labelled QAnon a domestic extremist organisation tied to threats and violence, as well as to racist and antisemitic tropes. Twitter and Facebook have purged dozens of pages, groups and accounts that promote the conspiracy.
Trump refused to denounce the conspiracy, a part of which believes the president is working against a "deep state" cabal of paedophiles and cannibals. He has also endorsed Republican congressional candidates that have embraced the movement, which has moved from an online fringe into the party's mainstream, with the president's sons and other prominent Republicans as well as right-wing media invoking QAnon imagery and language.
Asked directly for the first time this month what he thinks of QAnon, the president claimed he didn't know much about it other than they "like me very much, which I appreciate" and calling its supporters "patriots who love our country".
A bipartisan effort among House lawmakers would introduce legislation that "condemns QAnon and rejects the conspiracy theories it promotes."
