Laura Loomer is a former participant in the conspiracy site Infowars and a self-described “proud Islamophobe.” She is known for, among other things, spreading conspiracy theories about mass shooting and demanding that Uber and Lyft stop allowing Muslims to act as administrators. She has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Paypal, Venmo, and GoFundMe for violating her hate speech policies.
On Tuesday night, she won the Republican nomination for Congress in the 21st Congress District of Florida – the stretch of southeast Florida where President Trump is registered to vote. And on Wednesday morning, the president expressed his support, tweeting about Loomer’s victory five separate times.
“Great Laura,” Trump wrote in one tweet. “You have a great chance against a Pelosi puppet!”
Loomer actually has no great chance. FL-21 has been represented by a Democrat since 2013 and is generally seen as a safe seat for the party. It would likely take a massive Republican wave election for Loomer to run for inadequate Rep. To fire Lois Frankel, who seems exceptionally unlikely in 2020. (The Loomer Campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)
But their victory tells. In a healthy political party, extremists who celebrate the death of migrants and were arrested for trespassing on the governor’s house in California, while wearing a sombrero would get no more than a handful of votes. Instead, Loomer was endorsed by two sitting members of Congress – Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) – and completed by the President himself.
Loomer is now part of a group of foreign Republicans who will win congressional primaries in 2020, the most notable of which is Marjorie Taylor Greene, a believer in Georgia in the QAnon conspiracy theory who won in a safe Republican neighborhood and most likely after the Congress is going.
This is not an isolated problem. A closer look at Loomer, in particular, reveals that the causes of this rot run deeper than Trump and are most likely to continue the Republican Party after he leaves.
Who’s Laura Loomer?
Loomer is not a household name for most Americans. But she has long been a presence in the conservative media ecosystem.
She first attracted attention in 2015 when, as a college senior at Barry University in South Florida, she secretly filmed a meeting with the administrators, in which she tried to form a campus club that supports ISIS. The video was released by Project Veritas, the conservative group that specializes in (doubtfully edited) sting videos.
Loomer worked for Project Veritas during the 2016 presidential campaign and learned to build a career out of political stunts. She grabbed the national spotlight in June 2017 when she stormed the stage at a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York who dressed the Roman general as Donald Trump. The limitation earned Loomer a reservation on Sean Hannity’s show.
‘You made a very strong point. I applaud you for what you have done, ”Hannity told her.
Loomer parlayed the infamous of the Julius Caesar incident in a sort of internet celebrity on the right side of Trump. However, the problem with celebrity is that it can give you too many opportunities to show yourself. And Loomer proved to be one with real opinions that were out there.
After an ISIS supporter killed eight people with a truck in November 2017, she went on an Islamophobic rant on Twitter, accusing them of popular ride-hailing apps for deploying Muslim drivers. “Someone has to create a non-Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant broadcaster,” she wrote. The two services banned them thereafter, the first of many bans on high-profile tech platforms.
In 2018, Loomer partnered with the collaborative site Infowars to cover mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. She had suggested in a tweet that the students who spoke out against gun violence were plant: “it’s obvious these kids are reading a screen or noticing that someone else was writing for them.” In May 2018, after a school shift in Santa Fe, Texas, Loomer went even further – suggesting in a tweet that the whole thing has been staged.
“The doctor talking to media outside the hospital in Santa Fe, TX, where victims of a school vision were taken today, said they had just had a ‘mass slaughter’ at the hospital around the same time of the school drilling,” he wrote. “I’m sorry, but I can not help but notice this ‘coincidence.'”
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This particular cocktail of hate speech and conspiracy theory misinformation became the hallmark of Loomer’s political style, prompting the ban demanded from major social media platforms. The straw that broke the camel’s back on Twitter, for example, came in November 2018 when Loomer tweeted that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) supports female genital mutilation because she is Muslim. In response to the ban, which came a year after Twitter punished her blue checkmark as punishment for similar false and offensive claims, Loomer physically loomed her at Twitter headquarters in New York while wearing a Nazi-style yellow star (Loomer is Jewish).
Since those connections, conservative social media censorship has become Loomer’s business. She has found allies in popular law publications such as Breitbart and in Washington. In December 2019, President Trump retweeted a Loomer supporter and called for donations to her campaign. In May 2020, rep. Gosar wrote a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr calling on him to open an investigation into Loomer’s Facebook ban.
“Facebook essentially avoids using Loomer from that platform to talk to potential voters, raise money, and in fact, Facebook supports its opponent,” Gosar wrote. “This is an unreported campaign contribution and its value far exceeds the campaign limits.”
Gosar, together with rep. Gaetz, assumed Loomer during her primary. Positioning them as victims of Big Tech censorship – today a major concern on the right – is working to normalize them, to bring them into the mainstream of political debate.
The story of Loomer’s primary victory turns out to be fairly simple. Her fame among very online right-wing voters, such as Trump’s support and prominent right – wing Republicans such as Gaetz and Gosar, helped her increase more than $ 1 million during the primary – outraising both her lesser known Republican opponents and Frankel, the Democrat. She won 14,478 votes in the primary, about 43 percent of the total – enough for a solid plurality in six-way racing.
Their extremism does not seem to be an anchor. It was her selling point.
What Laura Loomer means
It’s worth repeating that Loomer’s disappearance is unlikely to win the general. House races are in principle linked to the national climate: For a Republican to win in a district like FL-21, which is about 9 points more Democratic-wage than average, there would have to be some sort of massive groundwater pro. -Republican sentiment. This is not what seems to be happening.
But although the perspective of Rep. Loomer should not cause one to lose too much sleep, should the fact of Candidate Loomer. She is living proof that the sober elements of the Republican Party have lost the ability to contain the fringe – perhaps permanently.
Think about Loomer’s path to prominence and primary victory. She came through the Conservative movement, a job at Project Veritas, and got signal boost by Fox News. They formed a hard core of support on social media, a right-wing base that banned large platforms from surviving thanks to promotions at far-right outlets popular with the GOP base like Breitbart. And then she was embraced by elected Republicans, like Gaetz and Gosar, and sent to victory in the primary.
For most of this time, there was not much secret about who Laura Loomer was. It is obvious that she is a conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim bigot; that’s their whole deal. These are red flags that a functioning political party would raise. In a healthy party, someone like Loomer would be highly unlikely to even get an entry-level job – and if she did, by some mistake in checking in, her career would be short-lived. Instead, she is consistently elevated by influential figures in the conservative movement. The more sober lying Republicans were either not or not able to stop this.
Loomer is not alone here. In this cycle alone, six sympathizers with the QAnon movement – a foreign conspiracy theory that pits Trump as America’s champion against a secret ring of pedophiles who run the government – have won Republican primary. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is overwhelmingly likely to win a seat in Congress.
Although Trump lit these fires, he did not start them. The real problems – an irresponsible leadership and an alternative media infrastructure that does not seem to have a moral depth – preceded him and will overtake him. Republican primary voters have been re-elected over the decades by these forces to take on a massive bloc of voters driven by racial control and conspiratorial thinking.
Loomer won ‘not despite a fool, but because she’s crazy, ”Conservative journalist Jonathan Last writes in the Bulwark. “It’s unclear to me what suite of policy options professional Republicans and conservatives could possibly offer these voters to compete with the psychic payouts they receive for voting for the Trumps and Loomers of the world.”
Even if Trump loses in 2020, even if he loses big, the problem of a GOP that raises votes like Loomer will still struggle over American politics. And it’s completely unclear what, if anything, the rest of the country can do about it.
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