Name: Trump's Loudest Anti-Muslim Twitter Troll Is A Shady Vegan Wed To An Ex-WWE Exec
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Trump's Loudest Anti-Muslim Twitter Troll Is A Shady Vegan Wed To An Ex-WWE Exec

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×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost Politics. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×AdvertisementAdvertisementHer Twitter timeline was one long screed that reflected the collective id of the Make America Great Again movement. Tea party rage, evangelical hokum and white supremacy ― it was all there. In sufficient volume, this kind of hate can now turn any no-account right-winger into a star on social media. And it worked for @AmyMek.AdvertisementMekelburg told Tina Galasso, a now-former friend, that she’d gotten to know Cortez before the murder and spent a lot of time with him. Mekelburg and Siino created a nonprofit organization dedicated to overturning Cortez’s conviction. She was the president. Siino was the moneyman. According to 2007 tax records, Siino donated more than $56,000 to hire Jeffrey Lichtman, a criminal defense attorney best known for keeping mobster John “Junior” Gotti out of prison. Lichtman was unable to win a new trial for Cortez.But the convict still had Mekelburg, who was devoted to him. When Cortez started serving his sentence at the maximum-security Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York, Mekelburg told Galasso and another now-former friend that she moved into a hotel near the prison. She posted her first tweet during this time ― a picture of a McDonald’s restaurant in Auburn, New York, with a “ChildObesity” hashtag. Siino, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles to called WeMash with Quincy Jones III, son of the famous music producer.AdvertisementHuffPost could find no evidence of Mekelburg ever holding a full-time job anywhere. AdvertisementMekelburg dropped some clues about herself on Twitter. She and Siino interacted in tweets during early 2013 but soon stopped replying to each other. And in July 2014, she posted a request for help in locating her cousin, who had gone missing in Pennsylvania. In local news stories about the missing woman, Mekelburg was quoted under her real name. Anyone paying attention to @AmyMek would have made the connection to “Amy Mekelburg.”AdvertisementIslam brought out her worst. She labeled the Prophet Muhammad a “pedophile” and a “mentally sick conman.” She called Islam a “pervert cult” and mocked Muslims for “lifting their asses” to Allah. She wanted mosques banned in the United States and called herself a modern-day “crusader.” Over and over again, she tweeted about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating America and the imminent threat of Sharia law. AdvertisementShe was nasty to Muslims she met in person and sometimes shot them dirty looks or insults. Galasso and the other former friend recall Mekelburg’s reaction when they encountered a Turkish woman in the Planet Fitness bathroom.“Amy was like, ‘Oh, it fucking smells in here. These people are disgusting,’” the second ex-friend said. “She could see the woman was in there. The bathroom didn’t smell.”If a person who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent used a piece of equipment at the gym before Mekelburg did, she’d “either clean it excessively, complain it was gross or refuse to use the machine,” Galasso said. “She was cruel in every form.” She’d doxed herself again.)AdvertisementMekelburg used Islamic State propaganda to support her own: Mekelburg had also been trying to make inroads into what Ibrahim Hooper calls “the cottage-industry of Islam haters,” which is run by bigots such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Brigitte Gabriel and Frank Gaffney — several of whom have close ties to the Republican establishment and the Trump administration. Their efforts can be remunerative, thanks to generous funding from conservative and libertarian foundations such as the Donors Capital Fund.AdvertisementJanet Lyness, the county attorney in Johnson County, Iowa, made the list because she donated to the campaign of Mazahir Salih, a Muslim woman who became when she won a city council seat in Iowa City last year.AdvertisementLyness, who is the chief law enforcement officer for Johnson County, didn’t realize Mekelburg had targeted her until she was contacted by HuffPost. “It concerned me seeing this, accusing me and all these other people of being jihadists,” Lyness said. “While it’s ridiculous, and everything she’s saying is false and ludicrous, I do wonder who might be reading this and might follow up and want to contact or threaten anyone on this list.”Mekelburg had plenty of warning signs that her hate-slinging might have consequences. “My dads bugging out,” she texted last year, around the time she was working on RAIR. “He calls me every day bugging out. … His business is in a Muslim hotbed and my brothers restaurant has the same name. World Trade Center muslim terrorists mosque is down the street.”In February 2017, after his startup went out of business following a trademark dispute, Siino found , the Connecticut-based pro wrestling entertainment company co-founded by Linda McMahon, who now works in the Trump administration. Siino, who did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment, became a senior vice president responsible for global content distribution and business development. Mekelburg told Galasso that the WWE knew about @AmyMek and had asked Siino to keep his connection to his wife quiet.When asked by HuffPost about the veracity of this claim, the WWE at first offered a cryptic answer. “This is the first time we’re hearing about Amy Mekelburg,” said a corporate spokesperson last Thursday, requesting not to be identified by name.AdvertisementThe company had reason to worry about Mekelburg’s Islamophobia. In the early part of 2018, the WWE and Saudi Arabia finalized a controversial 10-year deal to bring pro wrestling there. Siino was negotiating TV deals in the United Arab Emirates, according to the WWE. Back in Fishkill, his wife was casting Muslims as subhuman filth.AdvertisementClearly, Mekelburg wasn’t going to stop.On Wednesday, she emailed this HuffPost reporter ― not to answer questions or address or clarify any of the information I’d gathered about her. She wanted to muscle me. “My attorney, Martin Garbus (cc’ed on this email), will contact you tomorrow morning,” she wrote.Martin Garbus is a high-profile attorney who has represented Daniel Ellsberg, Nelson Mandela and Don Imus, among many others. Two of his current clients, Paul and Chris Gaubatz, are major Islamophobes. When Garbus did not call me at the designated time Thursday morning, I called him.“I don’t represent that woman,” he told me and then hung up the phone.But that wasn’t the end for Mekelburg. She posted a long thread on Twitter blaming me for the WWE’s decision to fire Siino over her bigotry. Within minutes, her followers began calling me with threats.“You better be careful because people are out there targeting you now,” one said.“You’re going to get it now,” said another.White nationalists, misogynists and neo-Nazis all amplified Mekelburg’s comments about me. So did prominent far-right propagandists such as Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich, both of whom had been instrumental in driving the near-deadly “PizzaGate” disinformation campaign.Unfortunately, hateAdvertisementSuggest a correctionNewsletter Sign UpHuffPost's top politics stories, straight to your inbox.Successfully Subscribed!Realness delivered to your inbox

×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost Politics. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×AdvertisementAdvertisementHer Twitter timeline was one long screed that reflected the collective id of the Make America Great Again movement. Tea party rage, evangelical hokum and white supremacy ― it was all there. In sufficient volume, this kind of hate can now turn any no-account right-winger into a star on social media. And it worked for @AmyMek.AdvertisementMekelburg told Tina Galasso, a now-former friend, that she’d gotten to know Cortez before the murder and spent a lot of time with him. Mekelburg and...

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Trump's Loudest Anti-Muslim Twitter Troll Is A Shady Vegan Wed To An Ex-WWE Exec

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