“The radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals. Change my mind.”
“The election was stolen from President Trump, and I’m just going to say it: It was stolen.”
“@BillGates you are a eugenicist and deserve every single person in the world to look at you in shame and disgust.”
Welcome to new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s deeply bizarre world, the same world President Donald Trump and his Republican Party want all midterm voters to inhabit.
New White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia has a lot to say
The quotes above, first reported by The Bulwark and Popular Information, are things Zacharia, whose first press briefing is slated for Oct. 13, has either posted on social media or said out loud.
Trump announced Oct. 11 that the right-wing commentator would become press secretary, writing
on Truth Social: “Katie has been with me, in spirit, from the very beginning, and will do a fantastic job!”
The first part of that is certainly correct, but the second part depends on how firm a grasp you have on reality and how willing you are to let your world be the same world Republicans inhabit.
Zacharia has raged online about the “woke left” and “their revolting, rabid, and unhinged hatred.”
Bizarre Zacharia believes Democrats are satanic child rapists
She babbled a bonkers conspiracy theory about the abortion pill mifepristone, falsely claiming it is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps” by Nazis.
The drug was developed in France in the 1980s, and Zacharia is a conspiracy theorist who clearly has no standards.
In 2022, she shared a Truth Social post from far-right conspiracy theorist and “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander that read: “Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform.”
Trump's new press secretary shows exactly what the GOP has become
There’s more, but let’s stop there and think about what it means to have someone like Zacharia acting as spokesperson for the Trump administration.
She hates Democrats and apparently believes that some are “sick pedo cannibals.” She believes that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. She thinks Trump should run for a third term in 2028, something the Constitution, of course, forbids. And she has suggested suspending habeas corpus, the foundational legal right for anyone detained by the government to challenge their detention in court, in order to round up immigrants living in sanctuary cities.
This is the kind of whacko and anti-democratic blather the Republican Party expects you to believe in if you want to be a citizen in good standing. If you want to inhabit THEIR world.
If you want to be a Republican today, this is what it looks like
You have to buy into the batty QAnon conspiracy theory, as Zacharia has. You have to show absolute fealty to President Trump, as Zacharia has. You have to think vaccines are some grand conspiracy, and you have to dislike your political opponents to the point that you call them pedophiles and cannibals and satanists, as Zacharia has.
If the person the Republican-led White House has chosen to be its voice believes utter nonsense and has freely, for years, demonstrated outlandish conspiratorial behavior, then those are the beliefs and behaviors the Republican Party embraces. Period.
As the midterm elections draw near, voters have a choice. And newly minted White House Press Secretary Katie “Sick Pedo Cannibals” Zacharia draws that choice into stark relief.
There’s reality, and then there’s a rabbit hole full of quarter-baked conspiracies and dark, divisive fantasies.
It’s up to us to decide which world we’d rather live in.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Press Secretary Katie Zacharia parrots GOP conspiracies | Opinion
