OpEd: If you still support Trump after this you deserve to have your throat slit!
The widower of a onetime aide to Joe Scarborough, the former congressman turned MSNBC host, told Yahoo News in a series of emotional interviews that the conspiracy theories about the death of his wife — promoted by President Trump on Twitter and embraced by the devotees of the QAnon conspiracy cult — have caused “inhuman” pain and anguish for him and his late wife’s family.
“It got to the point that I literally could not stomach this,” T.J. Klausutis, an Air Force engineer, said in exclusive interviews for a new three-episode season of the Yahoo News podcast “Conspiracyland.” Titled “A Death in Florida,” the “Conspiracyland” series explores the circumstances surrounding the July 2001 death of Klausutis’s wife, Lori, and how they triggered nearly two decades of conspiracy theories, first pushed by liberal bloggers and more recently adopted and turbocharged by Trump and his allies.
“I’ll use the term ‘suffering,’ quite honestly,” Klausutis said about the impact of the steady barrage of social media postings, complete with malicious and demonstrably false claims, about what happened to his wife. “And nobody, and I mean nobody, should have to be used in such a fashion. ... It’s just inhuman.”
Klausutis, who designs navigation guidance systems for the U.S. military, is speaking out publicly for the first time, three months after he wrote a poignant letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to take down the president’s tweets about the death of his wife. It was a plea that, once made public, reverberated throughout Silicon Valley and, in the view of some analysts, prodded social media companies to become more aggressive about policing the disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories that proliferate on their platforms.
Subscribe and download: “Conspiracyland” on Apple Podcasts
But Twitter has yet to take down Trump’s tweets about Lori Klausutis — a stance that continues to infuriate her husband. A medical autopsy found that, while working in the Fort Walton Beach, Fla., office of then-Rep. Scarborough in 2001, she died in a tragic accident caused by an undiagnosed heart condition. The local police found no evidence of foul play.
