Donte Stallworth—a former NFL player who killed a man while driving his car in a drunken stupor, a crime for which he served a whole month in jail—has been hired by the Huffington Post to cover foreign policy. However, it's not the killing of a person that has earned Stallworth and the HuffPo mounds of derision. It's Stallworth's history of advocating 9/11 Truth conspiracy theories and other completely insane claptrap. Bobby has a good run down of his long track record of idiocy here.
On Twitter, Stallworth has made a ... well, a rather limited recantation of his previous beliefs. Pay attention to the word choice in the first of three tweets "explaining" how his thinking has "evolved" on the "idiotic conspiracy theory that he vocally and repeatedly argued for":
Just to be clear, I no longer feel the way I did in that tweet 5 years ago.
— Donte' Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) September 4, 2014
I'm curious which tweet "that tweet" is. There were a lot of them. Gawker has a partial list. The time frame—five years—is also interesting. Because it suggests he still stands by, say, this tweet:
@jacobperry 1. con·spir·a·cy/ noun: conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. #FactsOnly 🙂 — Donte' Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) October 21, 2013
And I guess this tweet is still pretty kosher in his mind, given that it was offered less than five years ago:
Oops, I sent that tweet a little too early like the young lady from @BBCNews on the collapse of building 7 on 9/11...
— Donte' Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) November 25, 2013
But hey, the HuffPo's Ryan Grim assures us that he doesn't think those things about 9/11 having been caused by someone other than al Qaeda. I guess we'll have to take his word for it.
More interesting to me than the 9/11 Truther tweets, however, are his crazy vaccination conspiracy theory tweets! Deadspin has the rundown for you; you should really read the whole thing. As best as I can tell, Stallworth thinks that the H1N1 flu virus was cooked up in a lab in order to funnel billions of government dollars to the corporations, man. Or something like that.
It's worth noting that the Huffington Post has a history of giving stupid celebrities space to hawk their anti-vaccination theories. For instance, here's the child of a politician explaining that the "debate continues" about whether or not there's a link between vaccines and autism. And here's a Playboy bunny warning parents not to trust their doctors when it comes to the health of their children. So it only makes sense that they'd hire a wide receiver/killer with similarly nutty ideas.
Now, far be it from me to give the Huffington Post advice on how to run their business. They seem to be doing pretty okay for themselves. But it seems that they're missing out on a golden opportunity: RFK Jr., Jenny McCarthy, and Donte Stallworth hosting a celebrity-based anti-vaccination web video series! They can bring us all the latest "data" "proving" that they aren't "totally insane." Think of all the clicks! The series practically sells itself.
Keep making fun, peons. Arianna will be laughing all the way to the bank.