GOP cancels its own convention speaker after slamming 'cancel culture'

For night one of the Republican National Convention, the GOP focused on the ostensible scourge of “cancel culture” — their term for any pushback on their racism, sexism, homophobia, or anti-semitism. For night two, though, they canceled one of their own speakers after she retweeted a lengthy anti-semitic Twitter thread.

Mary Ann Mendoza was set to speak Tuesday night, presumably in her role as a so-called “angel mom” whose child was killed by an undocumented person in a car crash. Mendoza is somewhat of a minor right-wing celebrity, having been invited to be Rep. Andy Biggs’ (R-AZ) guest at the 2020 State of the Union. She’s also on the board of Build the Wall, recently revealed to be a criminal scam that lined the pockets of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon.

Just a few hours before the start of night two of the Republican National Convention, however, Mendoza retweeted a thread of virulently anti-semitic of tweets that hit nearly every anti-semitic trope, from accusing Jewish people of using economic warfare to “rob the ‘goyim’ of their property, to creating a “new order” with a dictator, to starting financial panics. Later, she deleted the tweet and said she had tweeted it “without reading every post within the thread.” She hasn’t deleted her numerous tweets pushing conspiracy theories about George Soros, though.

It’s a far cry from night one, when at least three speakers—Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), and former South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle—spoke glowingly of how the Republican party is the party that will stand against cancel culture.

Scott asked, “Do we want a society that breeds success, or a culture that cancels everything it even slightly disagrees with?” Haley praised Trump, declaring that “[h]e knows that political correctness and cancel culture are dangerous, and just plain wrong.” And Guilfoyle, who yelled her entire speech, declared that “[t]hey want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.