On Sunday night, President Donald Trump retweeted a call by conspiracy theorist and failed congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine for Trump to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci, who heads the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has rankled Trump by correcting the false information that the president regularly dispenses during his daily COVID-19 briefings.
As the Washington Post reported, Lorraine’s tweet declaring “Time to #FireFauci” came after the doctor appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, where he said an earlier move to implement strong social distancing guidelines “could have saved lives,” while calling the decision “complicated.”
Lorraine recently urged people to film their hospitals in an apparent effort to prove that quiet parking lots were evidence of a hoax or media hype rather than a consequence of hospitals banning visitors as a safety measure during the pandemic. In another March 30 tweet, she declared, “The FDA has never been interested in cures or safety.”
Lorraine is a right-wing activist and YouTube personality associated with Infowars’ Alex Jones who has appeared at the far-right American Priority conference. She was also among the many pro-QAnon candidates running for office in 2020. She earned less than 2 percent of the vote in the March 3 primary in California’s 12th Congressional District, which is represented by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Lorraine’s campaign slogan was “God, Family and Country.” Lorraine’s miserable showing came in spite of an endorsement by Jack Hibbs, a politically active megachurch pastor associated with Christian nationalist operative David Lane. Hibbs had told his congregation that he was calling pastors in San Francisco to tell them about Lorraine’s “crusade.”
