Former Trump Adviser Sebastian Gorka Still Pushing Conspiracy Theory That Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Secretly Dead
Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to work on the Supreme Court this week, but that hasn’t stopped former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka from continuing to push the fringe conspiracy theory that the 85-year-old justice is secretly dead.
Gorka had been one of the biggest mainstream voices pushing the theory about Ginsburg that was popular with the far-right fringes through QAnon, the anonymous entity that speaks in riddles and claims to give insights from deep within the Trump administration. Though the popularity for QAnon has dwindled considerably after a long string of failed predictions — including a report that Hillary Clinton had been arrested — there is still enough of a following to push along the conspiracy theory about Ginsburg secretly dying.
As Newsweek reported, Gorka is still one of those propagating the theory. After NBC News reporter Ben Collins called out Gorka in a tweet reporting Ginsburg’s return to the bench, Gorka responded by insinuating that she could actually still be dead.
“Too many people — not just QAnon folks (where it started) but also guys like Seb — got into this one,” Collins wrote.
Gorka responded: “How is there a ‘public’ appearance behind closed doors? Let the Games begin!”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has suffered a series of health setbacks, including suffering a broken rib and then undergoing surgery to remove two cancerous nodules from her lung in December. Ginsburg had done some work from home during her recovery, but returned to the Supreme Court on Friday.
She still has not made a public appearance during that time, which fueled the far-right conspiracy theory that she had secretly died and Democrats were concocting a scheme to cover up her death long enough that Donald Trump would not be able to nominate a replacement.
There were some other mainstream sources that helped push the theory that Ginsburg was secretly dead. Last month, the Fox News morning program Fox and Friends mistakenly ran a graphic claiming that she had died, which some conspiracy theorists believe was a sign from those in the know that she had actually died. There were other questionable stories, including one from the Santa Monica Observer, which claimed she was near the end of her life, but it was pegged as a fake news website that was only re-printing a story from last year in which they had predicted she was dying of cancer — a different type of cancer than she was actually diagnosed.
