More problems with Katie Zacharia

MS NOW -  Setting aside the jokes about the shortness of Katie Zacharia’s tenure as White House press secretary, the controversy over her claim to be a lawyer obscures a more damaging issue. For years, she promoted some of the most heinous and bizarre conspiracy theories bubbling up from the right-wing swamp….

Zacharia’s social media history suggests a worldview colored by baseless thinking, defamatory accusations and sinister fantasies — not exactly a good look for someone tasked with conveying the U.S. president’s policies and actions to the press and public with authority and integrity. The noxiousness of her posts and reposts was apparently evident even to her, since she deleted many of them before her new role was announced.

According to reporting by CNN, the Bulwark and the newsletter Popular Information, Zacharia has repeatedly accused people, particularly Democrats, of sexually molesting children. In April 2022, she reposted and later deleted a Truth Social post from “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander: “Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform.”

She repeatedly referred to Democratic operative and former White House chief of staff John Podesta as a “pedo,” apparently still connecting him to an outrageous child-abuse conspiracy theory that had been debunked years earlier. She later paid tribute to the late Robert David Steele, a conspiracist who claimed that children were being kidnapped and sent to a colony on Mars: “He was exposing the pedo rings of the elite cabal,” Zacharia wrote. “May he Rest in Peace and the work of his hands not have been in vain.” In another Truth Social post, she noted that “the radical left Hollywood elites are sick pedo cannibals.”