Trump Spent His Morning Retweeting Alt-Right Extremists and Shared a Video from InfoWars

Authored by esquire.com and submitted by wyldcat
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Facebook announced Thursday that it had banned alt-right and anti-Semitic figures including Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Louis Farrakhan, after designating them and their ideologies as “dangerous.” Donald Trump wasn’t happy about it, and made his dissatisfaction clear in a Saturday-morning tweet-storm that found the President of the United States sharing a video from Jones's conspiracy-mongering fake news platform InfoWars.

The InfoWars video the President retweeted hit at one of his pet fixations—his low approval rating among black voters. Trump has always been eager to suggest that, despite his decades-long history of racism, he has support from the black community. (He claimed last year to have the backing of a third of black voters, while his actual approval rating among African Americans hovered around the single digits.) The InfoWars video contains interviews with five purported black Trump supporters, which the president deemed “so great to watch.”

Trump, who has supported many conspiracy theories himself, appeared on InfoWars during his presidential campaign in 2015. At the time, Trump told Jones that his “reputation is amazing” and vowed not to “let [him] down.” Jones later claimed that Trump called to thank him after his election victory in 2016. InfoWars, which has trafficked in conspiracy theories ranging from chemtrails to Sandy Hook denialism, saw its channels removed from Facebook, Apple, Youtube, and Spotify last summer , though Jones and the other extremists were personally banned from Facebook this week.

So great to watch this! https://t.co/pYoiLjM0pz — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2019

"We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology," Facebook explained in a statement . "The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today."

Trump’s other retweets this morning included InfoWars regular Paul Joseph Watson and Canadian extremist Lauren Southern. The president also shared an Islamophobic tweet from an account called Deep State Exposed. Among its recent missives is the claim that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is the son of Hitler’s Gestapo chief , Heinrich Müller. In reality, Bob Mueller’s father was Robert Mueller Jr., a Dupont executive who’d fought for America during World War II.

"I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms," wrote the President on Twitter yesterday. "This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!"

upandrunning on May 5th, 2019 at 13:45 UTC »

Jones' own admission that he suffers from psychosis should give anyone pause with respect to anything that he says...he is his own brand of fake news, the origins of which are his own imagination. That a sitting president takes it seriously in any way should be of significant concern, regardless of your political party.

okapidaddy on May 5th, 2019 at 12:32 UTC »

Every headline about this guy should start with "Americans Allow...".

Americans Allow Trump...

dalejiw25 on May 5th, 2019 at 11:26 UTC »

Well, he is the head clown in his circus 🎪