Leah Feiger: Well, yeah, no, in your reporting, you shared posts of people calling her the DEI candidate. That’s what’s going around, and it’s not just Trump in the public sphere sharing this. These were conspiracies that were being repeated on Fox and all over the place.
David Gilbert: After those fringe platforms, we saw people like Laura Loomer, who would typically be called fringe normally.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, a very fun pipeline from the Republican nominee in Florida for a Congressional district to becoming an American far-right activist.
David Gilbert: But she’s become kind of more mainstream now because she’s got links to the Trump platform. She …
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God, the idea of calling Laura Loomer mainstream actually gives me full body chills.
David Gilbert: I know, but I think we have to because she’s just integral now to the discourse online in the Republican Party that, from my point of view, at least she’s mainstream GOP now, rather than some fringe character we can ignore.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean …
David Gilbert: But yeah, you were saying about Fox News, it very quickly moved from private Telegram channels to fringe message boards to X to, as you say, Fox News.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
David Gilbert: I think it was on a show called Outnumbered, which I’d never heard of before, but it was a host called Julie Banderas, and she was talking about how her daughters speak more eloquently than Harris, before adding that, I think she said, “I’m sorry, just being a minority does not make you fit for president.” I think a day later, New York Post posted an op-ed saying, “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.”
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: So this is a narrative that is being spread overnight, practically, from very fringe, pro-Trump, extremist message boards to the front pages of newspapers and on mainstream TV.
Leah Feiger: Is there any content moderation at all? I mean, in your reporting, and we should talk about this, these posts were not small. This really, as you said, went from fringe to mainstream pretty fast and millions and millions of views.
David Gilbert: Yeah, so as I said earlier, the platforms like Gab and Telegram, none of the racist or misogynistic content is taken down or was taken down. In fact, that’s why people go there, because they can post that stuff.
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: On X, there is kind of this veneer that it is a mainstream platform, in that there is some sort of rules, and there is some sort of content moderation in place. But as you said, some of the posts around this, and one of the conspiracies that really took hold on X more than anywhere else was that she’s ineligible to be president because both her parents were not born in the US. Now, this has been debunked so many times.